LOUIS FRATINO Book Release
Mast Books, New York, NY
April 4, 2024, 6-8 PM
Thursday, April 4, from 6-8 PM, Mast Books will host the official New York book release of LOUIS FRATINO, the artist’s first major monograph, published by Magic Hour Press.
This publication presents more than fifty of Fratino’s most important paintings from the past five years, all reproduced in full color. His expressive style responds to the rich lineages of the painted medium with an enduring sensitivity to form and light. Although his works encompass landscapes and interiors, flora and fauna, he returns to the figure of the male body with profound attentiveness. These subjects radiate desire, whether poised in a moment of tranquility or entwined in a coital knot, yet maintain a frankness the speaks to the intimacy of the artist’s gaze.
Born in Maryland in 1993 and now based in Brooklyn, Louis Fratino has been at the forefront of figurative painting’s international resurgence since his critically acclaimed New York solo debut at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in 2019. Although he has spoken of his admiration for modernist painters like Marsden Hartley, his approach to the medium is highly personal, reconstructed from memories of his own fleeting perceptions: an arrangement of limbs, a pattern of light and shadow. “Painting for me is not really observational,” Fratino says. “It’s more like a manifestation of an interior event.” What results is a timeless body of work infused with wonder and bursting with life.
This monograph presents Fratino’s work in a generously sized folio format inspired by 1930s avant-garde publications like Minotaure. The dust jacket features a new art work by the artist, includes an interview by the artist Carroll Dunham that touches on sexual impulses, gender subversion, and painting as an ageless device for working out what it means to be human.
LOUIS FRATINO
Published by Magic Hour Press
Edited by Jordan Weitzman
Designed by Katy Nelson
Introduction by Virginia Anderson, Curator of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art
Conversation with Carroll Dunham
140 pages, 10.5” x 14”
Hardcover with dust jacket