“I make paintings of the people I love, from memory. I want to make work that is tender and generous and optimistic.”
—Louis Fratino

Bathing its figure in a warm incandescent light, Louis Fratino’s Winter Morning, 2017, presents an intimate domestic scene that explores themes of love, comfort, sexuality, and queerness. In the painting, a young man stands in the bathroom doorway, staring out at the viewer. The running water in the sink freezes in a swirl of motion, contributing to the work’s overall sense of time standing still. The figure places one hand around his body and the other below his jaw, conveying a sense of expectation, as if he is aware of the audience’s gaze, and shy of exposing himself to it.

“I’m recycling so much art history in my painting and wanted to see what happens to my vocabulary, my mark using this material that was also used by the people I reference.”
—Louis Fratino

The mirror behind the figure reveals the presence of another man, facing him in a darkened room. In contrast to the expressive brushwork that delineates the central figure, from the golden yellow of his skin to the dry scruffs of black paint indicating body hair, the man in the reflection is a simple outline of black on royal blue. Mirroring the gaze of the viewer, the outlined figure in Winter Morning embodies Fratino’s reimagination of the male gaze, a unifying and reoccurring motif in his oeuvre.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Image: © Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, NY

Fratino’s inclusion of a mirror to reveal an otherwise unknown viewer references Velázquez’s iconic Las Meninas, 1656, a portrait of the Spanish royal family. The subject of the work is ostensibly the young princess and her attendants, but the rectangular mirror behind her head reveals the watchful presence of her parents, the king and queen of Spain. Velazquez cleverly paints the royal couple as they might see themselves, reflected in reality, gazing at this portrait of their beloved daughter. Fratino, too, places his viewer in the reflected place of the subject’s lover in Winter Morning. The viewer thus becomes not only an observer of the scene, but a participant in the story. The figure’s gaze becomes our own.

Through his work, Fratino reconstructs cherished memories, creating an ongoing painted diary of the queer joy hidden in the everyday. This vulnerable commitment to the painting of quotidien intimacy picks up the thread of queer figurative painting throughout the 20th century, from the delicate watercolors of Charles Demuth, to Joe Brainard’s collages, to the gentle intimacies recorded in the paintings of Bay Area Figuratives Paul Wonner and Theophilius Brown. “For me,” Fratino says, “my work is ultimately more about celebrating the everyday than it is about celebrating the spectacular or trying to find the spectacular in the everyday.”ⁱWinter Morning dares its viewer with its vulnerability, challenging them to find the beauty in their everyday lives, too.

ⁱ Louis Fratino, quoted in Joseph Akel, “Louis Fratino Discusses the New Age of Gay Culture,” L’Officiel, Sep. 2019, online.
- Provenance
  John Wolf Fine Art, Los Angeles
  Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2017
- Exhibited
  New York, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, Louis Fratino: So, I've Got You, September 10–October 8, 2017
- Literature
  Eric Sutphin, "Louis Fratino," Art in America, October 24, 2017, online (illustrated)