A monograph developing an iconographic apparatus that casts a light on the relationships between Italy and Louis Fratino's oeuvre, with newly commissioned essays and contributions by scholars of art and queer theory.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol at Centro Pecci in Prato, Italy, Louis Fratino. Satura presents works by the US painter Louis Fratino centered on his relationship with Italy—one of the artist's main cultural contexts of reference, and a perspective through which to view both his artistic and his personal experience. His paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculptures evoke the landscapes, people, and social scenes familiar to him, and imbue them with intense and erotically charged atmospheres. Essays by Stefano Collicelli Cagol, Giorgio Di Domenico, Filippo Bosco, Chiara Portesine, and Michele Bertolino elaborate on these themes. Satura includes artworks from the last decade as well as numerous new works, providing a thorough investigation of the artist's practice. The title comes from the Latin term satura lanx, meaning a dish filled with fruits intended for the gods, from which has descended a literary genre characterized by a variety of styles. In Italian, satura means "saturated" or "filled." Both the Latin and the Italian meanings resonate well with the richness and formal feast of Fratino's art.
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.
