Louis Fratino paints bright, erotic scenes of young gay men in various states of undress and arousal, often in pairs or groups and sometimes in flagrante delicto. The few images of other subjects here—a woman, a baby, a still life, even the Chrysler Building—tend to reinforce the intimacy and domesticity of the boy pictures and the impression that they share lived, personal moments.
The 26-year-old artist paints with a virtuosic brio that evinces his admiration for Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schutz. But he appears to love his early Modernist forebears even more than they do. The hunk in black briefs in Getting Dressed, for instance, pulls on his shirt in front of an open window in a scene that Matisse might have limned. And any number of Fratino’s figures, particularly the twinks and otters with closely cropped hair and huge almond eyes, might have stepped out of a Picasso, circa 1906. Notes of the fantastic punctuate the slice-of-life quality of Fratino’s work. A nude, bent-over youth writing a letter sprouts colorful angel wings; a man grasps his ankles while a smaller man emerges from his ass in what seems to be a queer metaphor for the birth of the self. Yet Fratino imbues these extreme visions with a characteristic gentle winsomeness, as if they illustrated stories for children, and the artist’s greatest achievement may be that he can make explicit gay sex look charming and wholesome.