Louis Fratino Rises to the Occasion

There’s a type of pornography in which the camera operator is involved in the action, shooting as they engage in various sexual acts. The resulting video, presenting a participant’s point of view, allows its viewer to imagine they – not some distant actor – are the one being penetrated or fellated. Louis Fratino achieves the same effect, albeit through different means, in his miniature painting Blowjob and Moon (2019), in which a man kneels on all fours, eyes fixed forward. Oral sex is about to be performed, but its recipient is just outside the frame – is, in fact, the person standing in front of it, studying Fratino’s neat brushwork. Most of the gallery’s visitors don’t seem to realize what’s about to go down.

The painting itself is a perfect example of the artist’s earlier style – largely abandoned in more recent works – deploying a punchy palette of reds and blues to give depth to an otherwise simply drawn figure. A blue glow outlines the fellator’s raised derrière, more luminous than the slender fingernail clipping of a moon daubed in the painting’s corner. That, however, is part of this work’s visual humour: the subject’s round rear is more like the moon than the real thing and, drawing all attention, has greater gravitational pull.

Many of Fratino’s paintings and drawings verge on the pornographic, displaying scenes of sexual activity that would easily blend into the homepage of Pornhub. Lurking behind the shock factor, however, is an obsession with human connection, giving nuance to even the most explicit of the artist’s works. Take Kiss (2023), a painting which sees one lover press his lips to his partner’s anus. Rather than a sleazy piece of smut, however, the piece foregrounds the intimacy of the rim job. Both men’s eyes are shut, their faces tender, concentrated, absorbed by passion. They are contorting for each other: one with legs raised, the other crouching down. Sex acts like this are often characterized as being motivated purely by lust, but this painting of two men coming together is as romantic as any first kiss over a shared strand of spaghetti.

In other works, Fratino toys with still life (Dahlias and Black Cherry, 2024) and landscape painting (Herring Bay, 2024). Things are not as simple as they seem, however, as the dark clouds above Herring Bay bulge to thunder: there’s something subtly erotic at play as the cumulonimbi form into tight, dark clusters, rippling like steroid-fuelled muscles. It would be difficult to turn from a painting of two men fucking (The Paper Lamp, 2024 ) to storm clouds brewing and not find something sexual in it, but then surely that’s the point. Still, there’s something underwhelming about this more pared-back style: if Herring Bay was exhibited without the other, more explicit works on display here, it would be fundamentally boring. By sticking to a gaudy but naturalistic palette – blue and green for the bay water, white and grey for the clouds – Fratino loses some of the joyful mischief that makes his earlier paintings so much fun to look at. 

Aside from the occasional flub, Fratino has a sensitive eye for both the frenetic and the quiet moments of life, whether his figures are asleep in each other’s arms (Four Poster Bed, 2021) or ejaculating into their own hand (Bastiano Chair, 2021). Through a sequence of vignettes like these, accompanied by less directly intimate works, Fratino’s work fleshes out a highly personal image of contemporary queer life. His sharpest works are pitch-perfect hymns to queer sensuality, proving that love that can be found in almost anything – provided someone’s there to point it out.

Louis Fratino’s ‘Satura’ is on view at Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato, until 2 February 2025

_{Main image: Louis Fratino, The paper lamp, 2024, oil on canvas, 99 × 119 cm Courtesy: the artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York and Galerie Neu, Berlin}