Hotel in Lecce
Louis Fratino American
Not on view
Fratino’s paintings combine a frank intimacy and celebration of the artist’s queer self-identity with his deep love of paintings from the past and present. The artist’s compositional strategies derive from this eclectic and ever-growing pantheon, including his tightly cropped viewpoints, his freeform, near clumsy modeling of the human body, his coloristic gambits, and his representation of desire and memory. Here the artist seems to nod to the foreshortened figures of the Italian Renaissance such as Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (ca. 1483; Pinacoteca di Brera). Fratino also relies on beefcake physique photographs from the 1950s and the paintings of Marsden Hartley as some of the sources for his candidly sexualized images of men.