“What style! Fratino’s Dionysian subjects are rendered with a skilled painterliness that takes its cue from Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall, with figures marked by exaggerated, flattened features inspired, à la the master of Cubism, by Iberian sculpture and African masks.”
Within the warm incandescence that saturates the canvas of An Argument, Louis Fratino invites the viewer into the intimate and seductive world of his dynamic painterly tableau, illuminating at once the tenderness and tension between two male lovers lying apart in the wake of an argument. Executed in 2021, the present work is exemplary of the atmospheric lull, contemplative tenderness, and abstracted figurative motifs that distinguish the Brooklyn-based painter’s practice, which deftly represents queer embodiment in the gestures of everyday contemporary life. The present work debuted as a centerpiece of Growths of the Earth, Fratino’s 2021 solo exhibition at Ceccia Levi, Paris, which received wide critical acclaim. From its delicate warping of spatial perspective to its stylistically contorted figuration, An Argument combines the very best of Fratino’s innovative aesthetic lexicon, which poetically constructs a relatable domestic and emotional scene that welcomes our sensitive gaze.
Fratino has emerged in recent years as one of the most exciting yet tender contemporary artistic voices with his examinations of human relationships and queer identity as sites of profound emotive expression. In the flattened depth of his paintings, Fratino situates abstract figures in various corporeal contortions, evincing his formal mastery over foundational Cubist and Modernist techniques employed by artistic forebears like Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. Often rendering the male body in figurations of languid repose traditionally reserved for the female nude throughout art history, Fratino’s visual vernacular fuses canonical painterly tropes with personal memory and fantasy to interpret queerness with distinct sensuality and sentimentality. Lauding the present work, Sasha Bogojev writes, “The paintings such as An Argument, 2021…are ‘classic Fratinos,’ deeply personal and revealing images of people he knows and loves, through which the artist is placing the viewer into his most personal spaces… Fratino still feels like ‘a poet of a painter,’ capable of creating both haikus and epics.” (Sasha Bogojev, “Growths of the Earth: Louis Fratino at Ciaccia Levi, Paris,” Juxtapoz, 5 July 2021 (online))
"The paintings such as An Argument, 2021…are ‘classic Fratinos,’ deeply personal and revealing images of people he knows and loves, through which the artist is placing the viewer into his most personal spaces… Fratino still feels like ‘a poet of a painter,’ capable of creating both haikus and epics.”
From body to body and room to room, An Argument is both resplendent with richly warm tonalities and construed of stylistic perspectival shifts, visual cues that gently imply at the unresolved quarrel between the couple: that is, the warmth and comfort of both the palette and the domesticity is contracted with a tilted spatial orientation, reflecting the imbalance of the scene itself. Fratino presents the subjects’ nude bodies in repose, which are loosely rendered in gestural contours and lit with the faint glow of a lamp, emphasizing their vulnerability within the familiar domestic space furnished with plants, books, and other knick-knacks. Fratino evinces his distinctive mastery of perspective by employing foreshortening to accentuate the stretch of physical space that distances the frontal figure and his counterpart, both of whom dwell in the quiet remorse and romance of the moment. Sleeping on opposite ends of the interior space and yet parallel in their posture, the subjects in An Argument physically reflect the inner emotional anticipation that binds the two, even in the quietude of their respective slumbers. By framing this intimate scene through the centered opening of a window, Fratino decisively invites viewers into it, compelling a spectatorship that powerfully invokes empathy when it might otherwise hinge on voyeurism.
Dimly lit and vividly poignant, An Argument represents a moment of strife, and yet in the poetry of Fratino’s brushstroke, this scene is sufficiently and invitingly tender to represent a chapter of inevitable friction rather than an ending between two lovers. Simultaneously recalling Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensuous morphology and Pablo Picasso’s abstract figuration, Fratino’s deft painterly hand gives way to tender musings on the embodied queer experience in the contemporary age. By eloquently capturing the emotional lull in the moments that linger in a dispute, the present work testifies to the apogee of Louis Fratino’s celebrated practice: “If anything firm can be said about Fratino’s practice, it’s how the artist’s smoldering gaze fuses soft power with decelerated, beautiful immediacy.” (Durga Chew-Bose, “Openings: Louis Fratino,” ARTFORUM, March 2021 (online))
