Louis Fratino “Morning”

Sikkema, Jenkins & Co

[Image: Louis Fratino "Eggs, dishes, coreopsis" (2020) Oil on canvas 42 x 42 in.]

This event has ended.

They have called me
“The exclusive poet of love.”
And perhaps this is true.
But the wind here that blows
on each blade of grass
and the noises of the distant city
whose lights are visible from where I stand,
do they not also speak of love?
And are there not behind these warm clouds
the sounds of an ardent love beyond which
there is nothing but silence?*

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. present Morning, a solo exhibition of new work by Louis Fratino. This will be Fratino’s second solo show with the gallery.

Louis Fratino makes paintings and drawings from specific memory and art historical references. Fratino synthesizes visual languages sampled from antiquity to modernism to describe the contemporary body, landscape, and interior spaces. New paintings of still lifes and interiors explore the tonal and emotionally evocative qualities of morning light, and the quotidian routines associated with that time of day. Searching for a sense of queerness in the gestures of everyday life, Fratino considers the nuanced interactions of light with form, space, and surface as potential realms for discovery. Influenced by the writings of Italian poet Sandro Penna and works by artists Filippo de Pisis and Marsden Hartley, Fratino looks for an essential queerness that lies parallel to the body, extending outward into a more complete world.

Born in 1993, in Annapolis, MD, Louis Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. The artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, curated by Jared Ledesma, will open at the Des Moines Art Center in November 2021.

*Sandro Penna, “They have called me,” in A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna, ed. and trans. Peter Valente (Brooklyn: Punctum, 2014).