In a room of the Central Pavilion at the Giardini, alongside the works of Filippo De Pisis, Louis Fratino is among the youngest artists invited to Venice for the first time. He is also listed in the top ten of the most promising contemporary artists in the world.
One of the most amazing halls at Foreigners Everywhere, the main exhibition at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, is dedicated to Filippo De Pisis and Louis Fratino, among the youngest artists exhibiting at the Biennale.
Born in Maryland in 1993, Louis Fratino has been experimenting with art since childhood and got his formal education in Baltimore and Berlin. Now based in New York, an exhibition in the Lower East Side propelled him to international fame. His sources of inspiration range from the monumental Picasso to Matisse’s stylized figures, and explicate into the brightest, almost fauve-like colours and in the brazenness of large-scale gay-themed, explicit pictures, filling up the canvas with naked bodies in joyful sexual encounter.
Fratino doesn’t paint live subjects, but uses photographs, memory, meditation, and sketches. Nevertheless, anything he paints has the character of immediacy, vitality, intimacy. He maintains he loves Picasso, and you can tell, as well as Lucian Freud’s tragic aesthetics and the power of Nicole Eisenman. To see De Pisis’ small pictures opposite Fratino’s large paintings is bewildering. De Pisis had to travel to Paris to be able to live freely as a gay man. In Fratino, we see freedom to the extreme, and explosive will to live.
