(Men’s bodies and man-on-man sex in explicit paintings, with some of my commentary in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Caught on Pinterest, this arresting painting:
(#1) Louis Fratino, Metropolitan (2019), drawing on Picasso’s Guernica to depict a gay night club; from Fratino’s solo exhibition Come Softly to Me, 4/18 – 5/24, 2019, at the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery in NYC.
About Fratino and his work, from the Sikkema Jenkins website:
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Come Softly to Me, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Louis Fratino. This is Fratino’s first exhibition with the gallery …
Louis Fratino’s deeply intimate paintings, often featuring lovers, family, friends, and the artist himself, present the human figure as a site of vast emotive expression. Paint is applied and blended in swathes of color and texture, forming a seductive tactility mirrored in the painted subject matter. Drawing from an art historical lineage of modernist figure painters — including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Fernand Léger [AZ: to Picasso, add O’Keeffe and Chagall] — Fratino’s works mine the possibilities of human connection amplified through the seductive power of the painted surface.
This selection of new works sees a shift from the domestic spaces that Fratino commonly depicts into the urban landscape, while also exploring psychological or metaphysical states. In some paintings, recognizable New York landmarks appear in the background as geographical markers of time and space, while in others, figures are unmoored from such associations, appearing in undefined color fields. In Fratino’s work, sexuality, intimacy, desire, and human connection are expressed as a constant presence for his subjects. [AZ: more specifcally, contemporary gay life is a major unifying theme, and both love and sex between between men are depicted celebratorily, but also as just another part of life, along with his images of daily life and portraits of friends and family]
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. Recent exhibitions include Night and Day, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY (solo); Heirloom, Antoine Levi Gallery, Paris (solo); Youth and Beauty!, MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, 2018 (group); and Matisse + Fratino, Cabinet Printemps, Düsseldorf, 2018 (group). 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.
Fratino appears as a figure in many of his paintings. The 2019 show featured two explicit self-portraits: a head shot and a standing figure:
(#2) Me (2019); notice the bullneck (and of course the big eyes)
(#3) Bushwick (2019); LF is a hunk, as you will see here
The 2019 show was rich in dicks and in fucking; for the latter:
(#4) Kissing Couple (2019); well, yes, kissing, but also fucking
Metropolitan (#1 above) is a gigantic canvas; in contrast, there are miniatures like this one, in which a young man is sweetly positioned to suck cock and humped up to get fucked:
(#5) Blowjob and Moon (2019)
On to LF’s second solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, Morning, 10/9 – 11/14, 2020, where the star attraction was this wonderful image of male intimacy:
(#6) Waking up first, hard morning light (2020)
I note that LF is only 30, so we have a lot to look forward to.
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