To someone (like this writer) with only a middling knowledge of art, it’s hard not to immediately think “gay Picasso” upon first seeing the paintings of Louis Fratino, 27, the Brooklyn-based painter who’s gotten a lot of attention from the art world in recent years and just finished up his second solo show, Morning, at New York City’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery. Fratino’s images of hunky, furry, young gay men having sex or lying around, alone or together, are decidedly non-naturalistic, boasting a lot of the Picassoesque features of modernism, such as body parts painted out of proportion or perspective, or broken up into cubistic components. The work also evokes Picasso contemporaries Marsden Hartley and Marc Chagall, as well as Fratino’s own well-known peers including Dana Schutz and Nicole Eisenman, artists whose work blends the figurative with the experimentations of modernism.
In Morning, though, Fratino also introduced landscapes and still lifes of daily Brooklyn apartment living, especially during this past year of COVID—during which he made much of the show’s work—everything from a sinkful of dirty dishes to a morning bathroom scene. From his studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Fratino talked to TheBody about painting during a pandemic, about just how “gay” (or not) he wants his work to be, and his relationship to an older generation of queer artists who made work during the AIDS epidemic.
Tim Murphy: Hi, Louis! Thank you for taking time to chat with TheBody. So what has the past year of living and painting through COVID been like for you? You made most of the work for your latest show during COVID, yes?
Louis Fratino: Hi! Well, I live in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with my boyfriend Thomas Barger, a sculptor, and our dog, and we share a studio in Bushwick, and yes, all but two of the paintings I made over the summer. I felt really glad I had the show to focus on because I would’ve been a lot more stressed if I hadn’t had anything planned. There was nothing else to do besides work this summer, so I got to pour myself into it. My work is mostly derived from things that happen at home, so it was very possible for me to continue working. I had a studio residency last year, and I felt so badly for the artists [who were supposed to have the residency] this year. I’ve been one of the more fortunate people in this whole [COVID] situation because I was able to continue doing my work.
Murphy: And there’s much more still lifes and landscapes in this show than previously, in addition to male bodies.
Fratino: It was kind of a natural development in my work, but this year put into relief how necessary it was for my work to change a little. I wanted the work to be a little more expansive, whereas before a lot of the work was directing the viewer toward my own body or the body of my partner. I started to feel that maybe that limited how people could enter the work.
Murphy: I was thinking about how a gay artist like, say, Mapplethorpe wanted to take the most beautiful photographs of flowers, so he wouldn’t get pegged as “just” a gay artist. Is that what you were thinking?
Fratino: Actually, kind of the reverse. Over the course of the year, I started to think, “OK, these depictions of sex or my body—who are they really for?” I wanted to show a more diversified experience of life, not just this one thing that could be easily consumed. I was trying to be more honest or accurate about a gay experience by complicating it. I remember I had some conversations with straight collectors or viewers [of his paintings of men being intimate or having sex] where they said, “I love that this looks normal.” It left a strange taste in my mouth. Maybe my depicting sex so much was not really as much for gay people as it was for straight people, this concept of performing an identity to be consumed.
Murphy: You wanted to show banal aspects of your gay life like dirty dishes in the sink or a messy dinner table, not just sex?
Fratino: I wanted to ask the viewer, “What do you need to see to understand that a queer life is something other than sex, and why is that the only thing you’re looking for?” I’ll never not paint nude figures, but I was trying to redirect or complicate the view. There’s many things included in a gay experience. Like the bathroom-mirror painting, the ring of hair from shaving in the sink. That’s the reality of living with another man. And there’s a quietness and specificity to that that I hope speaks to a truth about my experience, not just a caricature version of it.
Murphy: Do you work from iPhone shots you take?
Fratino: No, I make a lot of the work from memory. I’m interested in how I remember spaces I know intimately. That frees me from feeling like, “Oh, does this really look like me or Tom?” If I’m working from memory, I can run wild in a certain way.
Murphy: Can you tell us how you got started painting?
Fratino: I grew up in Maryland and pretty much have been drawing as long as I can remember. Since I was a teenager, I’ve kept sketchbooks that are diaristic, related to my immediate experience. I went to public school, but we had a really good art program; the art room was actually in the old gym, which was big enough to have easels in.
Murphy: Who were your early influences?
Fratino: When I was in high school, this book came out called Painting People, which was my first injection of contemporary art. So I became obsessed with the very specific group of artists in the book like Dana Schutz, Ridley Howard, Cecily Brown, John Currin. But I’ve always been deeply interested in art history as far back as antiquity. Not much has changed [in terms of my style]. When I was younger, I was painting my parents and my siblings, people I was close to. I went to Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), then did a Fulbright scholarship in Berlin before coming to New York in 2016.
Murphy: How did New York strike you after a year in Berlin?
Fratino: I don’t think I had time to sit back and reflect because I had a really lucky start here in New York, exciting but stressful. I came here without a job, but my uncle at the time was a dean at CUNY on Staten Island, so I stayed with him out there and commuted to a job at the Guggenheim Museum selling tickets, then as an art handler. But luckily my work was being followed on Instagram by a gallerist on the Lower East Side, even before I came to New York, and he offered me a show in the project space as soon as I arrived. So I started showing right away. I hadn’t expected to live off of my work for a long time, but six months after that, we were selling enough work that I felt like I could stop working. And I’ve been painting ever since, and I love New York and also hate New York.
Murphy: Why love and hate?
Fratino: I love the chance encounters you have in New York. I ran into [writer] Wayne Koestenbaum the last day of my show. I love his writing, and I got to talk to him about my work. I love that. I love that in New York, everyone is doing something, which gives you energy to do something yourself. In Berlin, there’s not the same kind of frantic energy, for better or worse.
Murphy: So what’s the hate side?
Fratino: I feel like people don’t know how to relax. I’ve been able to go to Italy quite frequently with this gallery in Paris that has a space there, and it’s such a breath of fresh air. They know how to enjoy themselves, when to say, “No, I need a two-hour lunch, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Murphy: Has life been a little more that way for you since COVID, with everything slowing down and shutting down?
Fratino: At some point during COVID, I realized I liked that I wasn’t constantly overstretching myself socially or feeling like I was missing out on things. I feel guilty to have any positive feelings about something that’s been so destructive, but definitely that was a plus.
Murphy: So, I’m curious, how do you feel about a non–art expert like me looking at your work and immediately thinking, “gay Picasso”? Is that reductive?
Fratino: I feel great about it. I want people to be able to have relationships to my work regardless of whether they care or know anything about painting. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to have the broadest audience possible. Picasso is probably one of the first painters you can name as a young person. Regardless of how much you like him, he changed the language of modern figurative painting.
Murphy: We think of Picasso as quite macho, and of course his figures and nudes were mainly women. Do you think of yourself as queering Picasso?
Fratino: I think that’s a way my work has been understood, but my approach is less mischievous. I want to be seen as doing something to painting at a formal level also. I don’t know if I believe that Picasso being referenced by a straight artist is more appropriate than him being referenced by a gay one. That’s kind of a ghettoized idea of history, where there’s hegemonic art history on one side and gay art history on the other.
Murphy: Are you influenced by any gay artists in particular?
Fratino: David Hockney, Marsden Hartley. I draw from the works of Yannis Tsarouchis a lot. If I’m not working from memory, sometimes I’m just copying paintings I like until they become my own. George Platt Lynes, Jared French—then moving on to Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring. I paint similar to how I eat, which is I appreciate [different things].
Murphy: Do you feel like you have some sort of relationship to those artists you mentioned last who painted in the AIDS era, many of whom died of AIDS? I read some reviews that noted your work seemed to depict gay sex in a less anxious, post-AIDS era.
Fratino: I’m 27. I definitely remember feeling shocked about how little I knew about that era until I was a college student doing my own research. I had a teacher in college, Ken Tisa, who lives here in New York, who was showing me artists who were making work then, and I thought, “This is my direct history or lineage as a gay painter.” But I also don’t know if I feel like it’s appropriate for me to portray in my work a level of tragedy or anguish that I haven’t experienced. That can happen in a way that mythologizes AIDS, and it’s not a mythology—it’s a reality for a lot of people. I think I’ve received some criticism that I’m renouncing that history by not more deliberately having a relationship to it. But I also love when Wojnarowicz said to fellow artist Zoe Leonard that the reason we fight so hard [politically] is so we can go back to having beautiful things.
Murphy: Right. So here is another tricky question for you in our current moment, which is that I know your work is not entirely naturalistic, but the figures do appear to be—I think—white, and do you ever think about making them more explicitly diverse?
Fratino: That’s a complicated part of painting today, questions of representation. There’s two sides of it. You want to make work that’s as inclusive as your politics, but you also don’t want to be using images of other people to pat yourself on the back for caring without having experienced what other people have experienced, whether that’s people of color or transgender people or otherwise. So I can make images of my body and my boyfriend, who is white, but also I think I can draw a body in a way that’s inclusive by not relying on tropes of whiteness or conventional beauty to represent them. In a way that it’s about a more universal understanding of a body that isn’t about how pale or dark someone is.
Murphy: Right. So I know that Instagram brought a lot of early attention to your art, but now you’re off it, yes? I couldn’t find you there.
Fratino: I am. I deleted my account last New Year’s. I think I just wasn’t feeling happy with how much time I was spending on it.
Murphy: Did you feel, as many artists and others now do, that it was something you had to be on to get your work out there, until you no longer had to?
Fratino: I definitely feel like I benefited from it a lot. I got my first show because the gallerist had seen my work there. And I miss that a lot of people can see the work there from really far away. That’s great. But yeah, for me it reached a tipping point where curators were no longer finding my work through Instagram. Sikkema Jenkins didn’t find it there. It just stopped being a fun way to ingratiate my way into New York and became another job—all the people you have to respond to.
Murphy: Do you miss it?
Fratino: Sometimes, for sure. I got it again for two weeks, but after a short period of time I didn’t want to post anything. And I felt upset that I was letting my own work, which I care about extremely, be used as content for these billionaires who ultimately are very conservative people. I thought, “I don’t have to participate in this anymore.”
Murphy: So let me finish by asking you what I like asking everyone, especially during COVID, which is how do you organize your day, and how do you chill out and enjoy yourself?
Fratino: I wake up around 7:30 and take the dog in the backyard. Over the summer, I’d check to see if any of the plants had bloomed or died. Then breakfast, and then Tom and I go to the studio. We met over Instagram, funnily enough, and we were aware of each other’s work. So we come to the studio around 10 a.m. and then stay until 7 p.m. and then go home and cook dinner and read a little bit or watch something. Right now I’m reading Natalia Ginzburg, a Jewish Italian writer during World War II. Her work is about family and about the drama of domestic life. Her work is about really serious and often painful things, but she’s so funny. She has this clear prose that makes me laugh out loud.
Murphy: How are you planning to get through the winter with another round of COVID coming our way?
Fratino: I see my closest friends, Austin Lee and Hein Koh, who are both artists, but it’s starting to feel like those days are numbered [with cold weather]. I have a show in Paris in May at Ciaccia Levi, but I don’t see going there for it happening. I love cooking. I’m making a lot of soup recently, which is not very glamorous. I haven’t been able to see my parents very much, so I make a lot of food that reminds me of being a child, maybe not the hippest food. Like split pea and ham soup. Or spaghetti and meatballs, which we had together every Sunday, and they still do.
Murphy: Oh, so you are pretty Italian then, like your last name.
Fratino: The name Fratino is from my great-grandfather, who was Italian, but actually we’re not very Italian anymore.