Louis Fratino


Louis Fratino is an American visual artist.

Education

Fratino graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. Fratino was a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin, 2015–2016 and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014.

Work

Fratino collects illustrated children's books. Some of his paintings are based on the photographs of Vince Aletti in Male.  
Art critic Holland Carter writes of Fratino's paintings, "Seemingly painted mostly in the same interior, they are also hot with the pleasure of lying-around-the-house domesticity, of shared privacy. And they are hot too with painterly attention and erudition — inviting a similar scrutiny from the viewer. Nearly every brush stroke and mark, every detail of furnishings and body hair, has a life of its own." Similarly, Antwaun Sargent writes in The New York Times, "Fratino and these other contemporary gay figure artists share a philosophy, despite their different aesthetics: They’re all committed to reflecting the mostly unseen interior lives of the men they admire, and to celebrating a diverse set of subjects who, taken together, stand in opposition to a canonical history of art that has long ignored an openly gay view of the male body."

Exhibitions