Next month, the 2024 Venice Biennale will close, and a memorable painting in the main exhibition will come down: I Keep My Treasure in My Ass, by Louis Fratino. With a title taken from a 1977 book called Towards a Gay Communism, the work depicts Fratino giving birth to himself from his rectum. It has been stopping visitors in their tracks. “I had a friend at the biennale,” says the 31-year-old American artist, “who said that people were almost queuing to stand at that painting – then grimacing or having physical reactions. Which to me is hilarious, because it’s so not naturalistic. There’s no implication of pain. It’s like a tarot card, almost.”
An unassuming figure in wire-rimmed specs, flannel shirt and New Balance trainers (who despite not being “super gregarious” is recovering from a celebratory night in a Florentine gay bar called Crisco Club that finished at 4am), Fratino is talking to me at the Centro Pecci in Prato, Italy, where an exhibition of his work has just opened. Promoted on giant banners throughout the city showing a magnified version of his tiny work Blowjob and Moon – one of which is slung over the ramparts of the local castle – the show is called Satura, and it’s his first solo show in a public art institution, rather than a commercial gallery.
In English, the title implies the saturation of colour. In Italian, which Fratino speaks conversationally, it denotes an offering of food. The artist, a devout bookworm and fan of the Italian poet Sandro Penna, adds that the word also has a literary aspect. “It is,” he says, “where ‘satire’ came from.”
Satura is a fully-fledged display of Fratino’s prodigious talents in painting and drawing (there are three delectable terracotta sculptures, too). The paintings include You and Your Things, which shows a naked man curled up on a sofa in front of a table covered in books, plates and still-life staples such as flowers and fruit. Fratino likes to riff on early 20th-century art, from Picasso and Matisse to Marsden Hartley and Duncan Grant, but in an explicitly queer way – something Hartley and Grant could never publicly do.
Visually sumptuous and unabashedly pleasing to the eye, Fratino’s pictures show gay men performing post-coital ablutions (Washing in the Sink), lounging naked in a boat (Ginone), smoking in bars (Rain in the City), and having sex (Kiss). Since Fratino paints largely from life, it seems that he’s having tremendous fun. “I am very, very fortunate,” he says. “But there’s a search for a beautiful life in painting – I think I use painting to bring myself closer to it.”
Does he ever worry that his work could do with a bit more angst? “No, because I think that would be performing something, and the work would be shit,” he says. “I do sometimes wonder if I was dealing with chronic illness, or I lost someone very close to me, I think that would probably manifest itself in the paintings.”
Considering his show in Prato, he says: “I felt a lot of pressure knowing about the political situation in Italy, how difficult it is for queer people to have families.” This is due to severe restrictions on same-sex parents, imposed by PM Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government, including the removal of some lesbian mothers from their children’s birth certificates. “There was maybe a responsibility on my part to make something that was very clear on its position. But in the end, that’s not how I paint. I make a work intuitively or subconsciously, never very clear about its vantage point. It is about being in a lived life.”
However intimate and joyful Fratino’s images, some have proved too much for certain institutions. His show at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa in 2021 was cancelled when Fratino insisted on the inclusion of New Bedroom, showing two naked men having sex. “The thing that surprised me the most,” he says, “was not so much that there was any evidence that people would be offended – but that there was just so much fear they might. I find that really sad because it demonstrated a really low expectation for the community that maybe would have celebrated it.” A spokesperson for the Center says that Fratino, “chose to no longer pursue the exhibition after a difference of opinion about where some of the works would be installed within the museum’s galleries.”
Fratino is the second of five children, brought up in Annapolis, Maryland, by the descendants of Italian immigrants. His mother worked for the US Census Bureau and was able to retire early. She has travelled to Italy for the opening of Satura. His father worked in construction – “he built the home I grew up in” – which could partly explain the sense of domestic intimacy in Fratino’s paintings, sex being just one way among many of sharing the pleasure of togetherness behind closed doors. “I was always exposed to the idea that a living space could express something or could be joyful,” he says.
The Fratinos were fully accepting of their son’s sexuality and his paintings suggest the family are close: his niece appears in some works, first as a baby, then as a young child (she is now six). “Figuring out new ways of painting her as she changes has been nice,” he says. “Before having nieces and nephews, I didn’t paint babies or children because they weren’t around in the same way that they are now.” He’s looking forward to painting them – and painting himself, and his lovers and friends, as they all age. “I’m excited about that,” he grins. “I can’t wait to get knobbly and ugly. It’ll be another challenge.”
As a child, Fratino enjoyed trips to the National Gallery in nearby Washington DC. “I have memories of seeing Sargent paintings,” he says, “and the only Da Vinci in North America” – Da Vinci’s portrait of the Florentine aristocrat Ginevra de’ Benci. In high school, Fratino was galvanised by Charlotte Mullins’s book Painting People, about the return of figuration to contemporary art. “That was a revelation: Dana Schutz was in that book, and Nicole Eisenman and Ridley Howard. I realised there was this whole world of people who were looking at things I’d seen in museums – but who were making work today. That was extremely exciting.”
Fratino studied at MICA, a fine art school in Baltimore, then won a Fulbright grant to Berlin for a year, which he spent painting rather than carousing in the city’s queer clubs. “I was 21 and pretty shy,” he recalls. “I went with my boyfriend from college, so we had our little life together.” After that taste of the working-artist life – he had a monthly stipend and a studio – Fratino decided to move to New York to try to break through. His day jobs included selling tickets at the Guggenheim, but success came quickly: his first shows were both glowingly reviewed by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. His paintings, she said, are “hot with the pleasure of lying-around-the-house domesticity, of shared privacy”.
And he hasn’t looked back since. He has two pieces in New York’s Whitney and his work commands hefty prices at auction (An Argument, also currently on show in Venice, netted $730,800 at Sotheby’s). Along with the accolades, however, Fratino has received some brickbats. He was driven to paint I Keep My Treasure in My Ass after a reviewer excoriated him for not painting trans people or people of colour. “Paintings have a viewership,” he says, “but when I’m making them they don’t. It’s me talking to myself, so I don’t entertain obligations to an idea of a community in my own studio, which is the one private, sacred place I have in the world.”
He also rejects the idea that his work may feel excluding to those who don’t share his identity. “That would be insane,” he says, “like watching a film with an all-female cast and saying that, while I like it, I couldn’t really appreciate it because there weren’t any men in it. I mean, maybe that can be dissected as an argument, but I feel like artwork doesn’t have to perfectly reflect the viewer to matter or to be meaningful. I don’t think people thought about experiencing art that way before now. I think it’s kind of bullshit.”
Fratino now has a studio in Brooklyn, where he works from 10.30am to 6pm, on several canvases at a time. “Painting is a pleasure and I want to keep it that way,” he says. “How would you do skin? How would you do wood? Or this leaf versus that leaf? It’s pure colour, it’s texture – and I take a lot of joy in trying to solve the puzzles.”
Louis Fratino: Satura is at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy, until 2 February. The Venice Biennale closes on 24 November
• This article was amended on 30 October 2024. An earlier version referred to three works as frescoes: they are terracotta sculptures.
