Heirloom

Flesh-ornament-vulnerability-hotness-intimacy-orchids A toe is sucked, belly buttons and buttocks framed with tiny tendrils of hair billow, ancient eyes with unfurling lashes caress the limbs of their subjects lovingly. The hot movements of the laden brush strokes flow eagerly between and fondle the limbs of the figures they depict, mimicking a sense of urgency to transmit unselfconscious desires between bodies in love. The warm fuz of wool blankets pressed into flesh against flesh is conjured. The languorous minglings of domestic objects, skin, body hair and fluids feel as though they are encased in these paintings under the window of an endless sun bleached afternoon, stolen hours on a living room sofa, or in the privacy of a flat share bedroom. Elsewhere a group of humans (perhaps a family) sit around a candle lit table, where another type of more filial intimacy is captured between the painted stokes, perhaps exposing the source or providing a larger framework for the feelings of tenderness and joyful exchanges in the more erotically charged pieces. Soft action, and interior moments are captured with a hotness that tumbles through each vignette of Louis Fratino’s painting, which flit focuses between time periods and styles in a way that seems to be very personal/specific to the characters they portray. I am very drawn to the sense of closeness captured in Louis’s works, the feeling of touching and warmth. Within the works he seems to embellish and accentuate certain parts of each of the subjects body such as; the hairs, eyes, spinal cords and belly buttons, which all become dislocated from the main of the figure to take on the quality of motifs/decorations in their own right also. These dislocated parts seem to act as signifiers for the vulnerabilities and personalities of each individual subject as well taking on the forms of abstracted patterns. When I look at Louis’s works I think about painting as an act of capturing a charged moment in subject/object relations. The artist fully embraces and revels in the sensuality of the medium, using this dimension to embellish his figures with increasingly sensual vigor. There's a palpable feeling of the pleasure in his strokes, which enhances the sense of liveness that the medium can have. The works have an affinity with some of Chaïm Soutine's, Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys series, which render their young mainly male subjects within similarly cropped almost bodily interior environments, allowing the flesh and warmth of their sitters to bleed into the fabric of their garments and surroundings in a pleasing and visceral way. This idea of the boundaries of self and other, paint, body, soft furnishings, and foodstuffs all bleeding into one another is an emblem that seems to run throughout Louis works. The artist considers his practice as ‘one long changing body’ and this seems a perfect analogy for what is happening on the canvas, for the vignettes of life we are privy to as well as those which seem to happen off the canvas that we are not. In a time where so much of our experience of touching, looking and interacting is mediated through technology and thus stripped of certain sensations related to taste and smell. Louis paintings feel like a welcome slither of fleshy intimacy. It feels like these works have the scent of skin and joyful fluids entrapped between their licks of paint. - Zoe Williams, 2018

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