Brooklyn Artist Louis Fratino Is Depicting Gay Male Sex and Intimacy in the More Chill Gen Z Era of PrEP
Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
To someone (like this writer) with only a middling knowledge of art, it’s hard not to immediately think “gay Picasso” upon first seeing the paintings of Louis Fratino, 27, the Brooklyn-based painter who’s gotten a lot of attention from the art world in recent years and just finished up his second solo show,
Morning, at New York City’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery. Fratino’s images of hunky, furry, young gay men having sex or lying around, alone or together, are decidedly non-naturalistic, boasting a lot of the Picassoesque features of modernism, such as body parts painted out of proportion or perspective, or broken up into cubistic components. The work also evokes Picasso contemporaries Marsden Hartley and Marc Chagall, as well as Fratino’s own well-known peers including Dana Schutz and Nicole Eisenman, artists whose work blends the figurative with the experimentations of modernism.