Published by Mousse Publishing. Edited with text by Stefano Collicelli Cagol. Text by Giorgio Di Domenico, Filippo Bosco, Chiara Portesine, Michele Bertolino.
This volume presents a selection of work from American painter Louis Fratino, centered on his relationship with Italy, one of the artist’s main cultural contexts of reference and a perspective through which to view both his artistic and his personal experience. His works evoke the landscapes, people and cultural context that animate the artist’s everyday life, creating intense and erotically charged atmospheres. Alongside paintings, drawings, etchings and sculptures from the last decade, Satura includes new works providing a thorough investigation of the artist’s practice. The title Satura comes from the Latin meaning of the word, referring to lanx satura, a dish filled with first fruits intended for the gods, from which descended a literary genre characterized by a variety of styles. In Italian, satura translates to “saturated” or “filled.” Both Latin and Italian meanings resonate well with the richness and formal feast of Fratino’s art. Louis Fratino was born in Maryland in 1993 and received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is currently featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. His work is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the RISD Museum, Providence; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn.
Published by Magic Hour Press. Edited by Jordan Weitzman. Introduction by Virginia Anderson. Conversation between Louis Fratino and Carroll Dunham.
Since his critically acclaimed 2019 solo exhibition in New York, American painter Louis Fratino (born 1993) has been at the forefront of figurative painting’s international resurgence. This is the first major monograph for the artist, gathering more than 50 of his most important works to date. Although he has spoken of his admiration for modernist painters including Picasso and Marsden Hartley, Fratino's approach to the medium is highly personal, reconstructed from memories of his own fleeting perceptions. His figures radiate desire; whether poised in a moment of tranquility or entwined in a coital knot, he depicts them with a frankness that speaks to the intimacy of the artist’s tender gaze. For this publication, Fratino’s work is presented in a generously sized folio format inspired by 1930s avant-garde publications such as Minotaure and Verve, and its dust jacket features a new artwork by the artist.
Louis Fratino