Louis Fratino (American, born in 1993) creates evocative paintings that depict men often engaged in sex or enjoying each other’s company in daily life. His virtuous brushstroke, brilliant use of color and apparent effortlessness with the process of painting, already granted him significant institutional presence.

Peeing in a sink (oil on canvas, 2017) is a provoking title for an image that we would otherwise associate with the story of Narcissus, who admires his own reflection in water. In this, again, seemingly effortlessly painted work, Fratino used a reduced color palette of gray and blue hues, giving red a main role in shaping the figure, which almost does not fit in the canvas and, in this manner, comes very close to the viewer. The fluid lines emphasize the substance of water, and glide sensually along the strong fit body of the figure. There is a long tradition of portraying the subject of peeing throughout art history; think Rembrandt’s drawings, the popular Manneken Pis in Brussels, or Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal that symbolically initiated conceptual art.

In Burgers with your dad (oil on canvas, 2016) three male figures enjoy the most prosaic activity, eating burgers together on a terrace on summer day. The title could suggest, however, that we see two lovers with the father of one of them – stressing the highly needed normalization of LGBTQ relationships that is still not common in many parts of the world. Fratino offers a dazzling play with the perspective (the table is almost vertically placed; the legs of the sitting person embrace the shape of the table in an impossible position), while cropping the figures so that the viewers need to switch on their imagination to complete their bodies.