The male nude is a recurring subject in Louis Fratino’s work. It appears in scenes of domestic and sexual intimacy, including explicit tableaux that are not only the representation of homoerotic desire but that also describe vulnerability, tenderness, and romantic complicity, made up of caresses, kisses, and languid gazes. This exhibition, “Satura,” curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol, comprised approximately seventy works dating from 2017 to 2024, including twelve paintings created specifically for the occasion. The show didn’t simply display open and uncompromising sexual content; it also encompassed a vast array of cultural references to artists and writers of Italy, where the American artist has been a frequent visitor, painting seascapes, cozy Roman interiors, and iconic Milanese bars and dancing joints.
In one emblematic painting, You and your things, 2022, the artist draws us into his everyday environment: In the background his naked companion, stretched out on the sofa, looks at him with a relaxed gaze, while in the foreground he depicts a table invaded by objects, food, drinks, and flowers. This crowded still life—consonant with the exhibition title, which refers to the Latin Satura lanx, a plate of fruits, but in Italian also means “being full”—contains additional, less explicit queer elements: Among the plates and peeled tangerines we can glimpse the magazine FUORI! (Out!), headed by Mario Mieli, a leading figure in the struggles for gay civil rights in Italy; the book Vita Meravigliosa (Wonderful Life, 2020) by lesbian poet Patrizia Cavalli; and Dino Buzzati’s novel Il Deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe, 1940). In thinking about his role as a gay artist, Fratino seeks precedents in the Italian literary and artistic milieu, finding inspiration in authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose films and writings offer the possibility of an irreverent appropriation of tradition through a queer perspective, or Sandro Penna, who focused his poetry on the desire of the male body with an unapologetic immediacy that reverberates in Fratino’s paintings, colored with a crepuscular melancholy.
If his European and American influences—Marsden Hartley, Henri Matisse, Alice Neel, and above all Pablo Picasso—are evident, this exhibition emphasized his references to an interwar Italian artistic context that is little known abroad. Formal and chromatic elements can be traced back to the bold color schemes of the artists of the Scuola Romana, such as Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and Mario Mafai, or to the realism of Renato Guttuso. But most important is Filippo de Pisis, who, with his discreet eroticism, offers Fratino the inspiration to translate into painting gay issues that he cares deeply about: using frontal postures, exposed genitals, and hair (which he paints with evident passion) and catching fragments of beauty in everyday life as de Pisis did. With extraordinary pictorial skill, Fratino employs incongruous chromatic contrasts to suspend scenes in a space between realism and dream, as in The pink and green light, 2024. And he sometimes ventures into destabilizing perspectives, as in Four Poster Bed, 2021, where the bodies, abandoned between pleasure and sleep, reflect the other’s unarmed humanity.
Fratino paints the mysteries and challenges of intimacy with the same empathic attention with which he renders bouquets of flowers or luminous Mediterranean landscapes: Nature, beauty, and sensuality coexist in a balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In the twilit Garden at Dusk, 2024, the large painting that concludes the exhibition, two young men are relaxing, one reading, the other tending plants. They are surrounded by the opulence of nature in a world that exalts money. Amid screaming voices, Fratino speaks instead of a simple, frugal happiness, of soft voices in the stillness of evening. It is this that he recounts: his life, and it could be the life of so many. He does so with the desire to paint reality, without pretense, and this shameless authenticity is today more important than ever.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
