PRATO, Italy — Earlier this year, something drew me back to the diaries of Anaïs Nin. Decades ago I had read several volumes. These stories, which chart the French-American author’s libertine literary life in Paris and New York from the early 1930s, were especially popular after the steamy film adaptation of an early diary, Henry and Junewas published in 1990. Rereading them, I am once again drawn into Nin’s exquisite prose, her lush place descriptions and her erotic longings as the Second World War invades Paris. As always, her confessions reveal a multitude of desires.
You start to think: what has become of embodied eroticism, of desire, of the search and celebration of beauty, in today’s algorithm-driven, left-or-right world (or, for that matter, in an art world steeped in the cerebral) ? , of intimate vulnerability, or of vulnerable intimacy? Who still finds poetry and pleasure in the sight of fallen petals, or in sunlight on the skin? by Louis Fratino Saturationthe artist’s very first institutional exhibition, on view at the Centro Pecci, assured me that someone still does.
The exhibition’s nearly seventy works—many figurative paintings, a series of lithographs, three frieze-like sculptures, and a few of the artist’s sketchbooks—together are as rich as a retrospective (even if such a thing would be premature: Fratino is only 31). They are also full of expressions of everyday tenderness. Some of the depicted scenarios are overtly homoerotic, others are ordinary scenes made extraordinary in their bold colors, compositions and techniques that draw on art historical greats such as Chagall, Picasso and even Alice Neel, but also refer to Italian 20th century artists as Filippo De Pisis. Like Nin’s writings, the paintings are a diary of visual vignettes from Fratino’s own life, rendered from memory and populated by his friends, family and lovers. A handful of works depict explicitly sexual scenes, but these are never gratuitous; rather, they offer a glimpse of a rich emotional register beneath the thirsty aesthetics we have come to associate with contemporary gay visual culture.
Many pieces reflect intimate moments between lovers (invariably young, toned, dark-haired and heavy-browed, some recognisably Fratino himself); others enjoy everyday pleasures. In ‘Four Poster Bed’ (2021), two naked men sleep in a bath of light on the title bed, stretched out on top of each other in an intriguing curtain of sheets. There are wilted hydrangeas in a sink (“Hydrangea aspera, kitchen sink”, 2024), a lying naked lover near a messy table (“You and your things” from 2022 – Fratino’s many after-meal tables are less souvenir mori than evidence of pleasure and satiety). The canvases are rich in references to film and literature: hidden among the still lifes, for example, are the covers of books by 20th-century Italian queer writers, including Sandro Penna and Mario Miele. In small clues in many paintings, the artist reveals himself to be an avid reader, and it was intriguing to learn that he, an Italian-American who grew up in Maryland, has recently learned the language of his ancestors and delved into the Italian culture of the 20th century. .
The domestic moments depicted are offset by studies of more communal pleasures: there’s a boisterous bunch of googly-eyed blue fish in a market (“Fish Market”, 2020), and dreamy blue seascapes day and night (“Last dive of the season” and ‘ Moon over the Gulf of Genoa’, both 2020). In “YMCA” (2023), a group of naked men shower together in a steamy room whose overlapping surfaces reflect early Cubism; and in ‘Arci Bellezza’ (2023), whose title refers to a popular gay club in Milan, the tightly packed dancers form a rhythm of vertical lines and deep neutrals and blues.
Centro Pecci, a dynamic contemporary art institute in Prato, a Tuscan city centered on the Italian textile industry, has dedicated an elongated room to Saturation. The name refers to both a pastry dish and the Italian word saturo — ‘saturated’ or ‘saturated’, both of which apply to the works on view here. Curator Stefano Collicelli Cagol opens with two early, very small works (one of which is the small ‘Blowjob and Moon’, 2019) and then, a few steps further, seven enchanting lithographs with naked couples or flowers in stark contrast. But otherwise, he has arranged the works according to loose visual affinities rather than chronology, format, scale, or narrative, allowing viewers to wander and make their own connections—and given the density of Fratino’s scenes, this is not always an easy task. I found it more compelling to delve into individual works, from afar and up close, to absorb their many references and to consider their formal complexities. These paintings are wonderfully tactile, and when viewed up close the brushwork and paint application are almost topographical: some surfaces are cross-hatched with deep parallel scratches, and the body hair of Fratino’s subjects is sometimes etched or appears drawn or painted. twists.
When I spoke to Fratino on the opening days almost a hundred years ago about Nin’s search for meaning, depth and the sensual in equally tense times, the artist mentioned the importance of building ‘a beautiful life’. His simple statement has stayed with me: are these works perhaps part of a desire of not only the artist, but of many of us, to search for the sublime, to access the generative power of the erotic? Fratino’s canvases seem to reflect a universal and timeless desire. It was interesting to learn that he does not work from posed models, but from his memory, joining the remembered fragments of his life into a sum greater than their parts. Focusing on beauty in an era characterized by much ugliness, Saturation feels like a subtle act of resistance.
Louis Fratino: Satura continues at Centro Pecci (Viale della Repubblica 277, Prato, Italy) until February 2, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol.
Editor’s note: Some travel for the author was paid for by Center Pecci.
