LOUIS FRATINO: SATURA

Fratino’s tender portraiture and intimate interiors evoke his own associations with the Italian landscape and cultural tradition

This volume presents a selection of work from American painter Louis Fratino, centered on his relationship with Italy, one of the artist’s main cultural contexts of reference and a perspective through which to view both his artistic and his personal experience. His works evoke the landscapes, people and cultural context that animate the artist’s everyday life, creating intense and erotically charged atmospheres. Alongside paintings, drawings, etchings and sculptures from the last decade, Satura includes new works providing a thorough investigation of the artist’s practice. The title Satura comes from the Latin meaning of the word, referring to lanx satura, a dish filled with first fruits intended for the gods, from which descended a literary genre characterized by a variety of styles. In Italian, satura translates to “saturated” or “filled.” Both Latin and Italian meanings resonate well with the richness and formal feast of Fratino’s art.
Louis Fratino was born in Maryland in 1993 and received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is currently featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. His work is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the RISD Museum, Providence; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn.