For The Art Show 2022, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present a selection of new works by Louis Fratino.
Louis Fratino creates deeply intimate paintings and drawings from personal memory and the quietly sublime offerings of everyday life. His figurative subjects include lovers, friends, family, and the artist himself, illuminating the human body as a site of vast emotive expression. Sexuality, intimacy, and queer desire are understood as natural, constant; suffusing the psychical atmosphere of his scenes in vibrant and comforting familiarity. Invoking an art historical lineage of modernist painters—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, and Fernand Léger— Fratino’s works mine the possibilities of communion and connection, amplified through the seductive power of the painted surface.
Fratino’s interiors and still lifes extend the gestural, sensuous embodiment of figuration into the realms of the domestic and iconographic. The tonal and emotional qualities of light refract a glowing tenderness upon the spaces and items that populate Fratino’s life, rendering the quotidian routines associated with a particular time of day in lush clarity. Specific objects—fruit, photographs, sketchbooks, small sculptural pieces— appear and reappear in scenes, residing in the visual narrative of Fratino’s oeuvre, persisting like a memory. Searching for a sense of queerness in the gestures of everyday life, Fratino considers the nuanced interactions of light with form, space, and surface as potential realms for discovery.