A brush with... Louis Fratino

Louis Fratino talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Fratino was born in 1993 in Annapolis, Maryland, US, and lives in New York. His paintings reflect on memory and the intimate details of daily life to transmit a deeply felt response to his immediate circumstances and the world beyond. His vision is channelled through an abiding passion for art history, and particularly Modernist painters in Europe and the US. Louis’s subjects are the people and places around him, beginning with himself and extending to family, friends, partners and lovers, who he pictures in interior spaces from kitchens to bathrooms and bedrooms, as well as in the city and in nature. Crucial to his art is an exploration of queer life, from touching scenes of companionship to images of sex and desire more broadly. Louis’s painting possesses an everyday poetry yet dwells on the big questions of life. It is a singular and deeply personal practice as well as a major contribution to the expression of queer identity and sexuality in a painterly field that has until recent decades been dominated by heteronormative perspectives. If there is a philosophy in his painting, he says, it is “about living very intensely” and being “very open to experiences”. He reflects on the balance between reality and fantasy in his painting, on how memory is the principal subject of his work, and how he enjoys the “feeling of play in painting”. He discusses artists from Henri Matisse, with whom he has a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art between March and September, to Bhupen Khakhar and Winifred Nicholson, the photographer George Platt Lynes, the poet Sandro Penna and the film-maker Dag Johan Haugerud. Plus, he gives insight into life in his studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for? 

Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again, Baltimore Museum of Art, US, 11 March-6 September. 

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