Louis Fratino Morning

About

Louis Fratino makes paintings and drawings from specific memory and art historical references. Fratino synthesizes visual languages sampled from antiquity to modernism to describe the contemporary body, landscape, and interior spaces. New paintings of still lifes and interiors explore the tonal and emotionally evocative qualities of morning light, and the quotidian routines associated with that time of day. 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. Influenced by the writings of Italian poet Sandro Penna and works by artists Filippo de Pisis and Marsden Hartley, Fratino looks for an essential queerness that lies parallel to the body, extending outward into a more complete world.

Born in 1993, in Annapolis, MD, Louis Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. The artist's first institutional solo exhibition, curated by Jared Ledesma, will open at the Des Moines Art Center in November 2021.