Louis Fratino

American artist Louis Fratino (born 1993 in Annapolis, MD) 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, rendering the human body as a site of vast emotive expression. Sexuality, intimacy, and queer desire are understood as natural and constant, suffusing the 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 Georgia O'Keeffe— Fratino's work mines the possibilities of communion and connection, amplified through the seductive power of the painted surface.