“My main source of inspiration is memory, my subjects come from there. Memory is a mixture of observation and imagination, but there is always a part that escapes recollects ion. I’m interested in filling that void with my imagination.”
Imbued with sensuality and sent.mes ntality, Anemones and Mimosas fuses personal memory and material objects into an unforgettable scene, embodying the very best of artist Louis Fratino’s innovative aesthetic lexicon. Rife with vivid and luxurious pictorial spectacle, Anemones and Mimosas combines velvety surfaces, intricate textures, and delicate light to construct an emotion-filled interior landscape that captures the intimacy and playful tenderness found within everyday queer life. Executed in 2021, Anemones and Mimosas debuted to critical acclaim as a centerpiece of Fratino’s 2021 solo exhibition Growths of the Earth at Ceccia Levi, Paris. Test.mes nt to the importance of the artist’s work, Fratino is featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Paintings by the artist reside in esteemed institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
“I like this mysticism around painting, where you can manifest something through it, whether it’s something as simple as doing the dishes, or being in love with someone, or feeling close to your family," says the artist. “You make this painting of dishes that you love, and now that’s, in a small way, a part of doing dishes forever.”
Plucked from the domestic space and strewn and settled across the table, the contents of Anemones and Mimosas coalesce to create a relatable emotional and domestic scene that welcomes our sensitive gaze. Fratino lovingly renders the contents of the table, from a bouquet of bright wildflowers to odds and ends scattered about—scissors, charcoal, pencils, half-finished drawings—reveling in the disclosing nature of objects and our intimate relationship with them. Quick brushstrokes reveal the shy bearing of a lone button, the sparkling joy of shiny nails piled together, the tender embrace of tangled stems in a glass vase. The objects push forward into our gaze, the stylistic perspectival shifts and a tilted spatial orientation creating dynamic tension that results in a charged intimacy, even in the inanimacy of things. Thick and bodily applications of paint allow the waxy surface of oil paint and collaged paper to take on similar qualities, both resplendent with richly warm tonalities. The surface of the canvas is finely scored and textured through the use of palette knives and scraping–lingering testimonies to the artist’s hand.
Anemones and Mimosas is a confessional form, diary-like in its rawness and simplicity. Fratino portrays the thrilling mix of recollects ion and fantasy, the mundane and the sublime, that can coexist in the human experience. “My attraction to representing the things I love, have loved, or want to love comes from a belief that painting has the power as “living” images to alter our experiences of the real world” says Fratino. “My main source of inspiration is memory, my subjects come from there. Memory is a mixture of observation and imagination, but there is always a part that escapes recollects ion. I’m interested in filling that void with my imagination.” (the artist quoted in: Elisabetta Berti, “In the intimacy of Louis Fratino”, la Repubblica, 10 October 2024, p. 86) Fratino’s still life is transitory and fleeting, lost if one did not look. “I like this mysticism around painting, where you can manifest something through it, whether it’s something as simple as doing the dishes, or being in love with someone, or feeling close to your family," says the artist. “You make this painting of dishes that you love, and now that’s, in a small way, a part of doing dishes forever.” (the artist quoted in: Drew Zeiba, Siddhartha Mitter and Camille Okhio, “Painting the World As They See It”, W Magazine, 5 March 2021 (online))
“Touch drives the work. Often that is the physical touch between two people or maybe even the sensory touch of recognizing a surface or sensation, where even if the eyes are a bit larger or the color is not naturalistic, there is something there that makes you believe in what you’re looking at."
Through his examinations of sites of profound emotive expression, Fratino has emerged in recent years as one of the most thrilling and tender contemporary artistic voices. Anemones and Mimosas is a culmination of the artist’s distinct practice of incorporating memory alongside art historical references. Simultaneously recalling Georgia O’Keeffe’s rolled, sensuous morphology, the flattened depth evident in the present work evinces a formal mastery over the foundational Cubist and Modernist techniques employed by forebears like Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. Quotidian items congregate atop the tilted tabletop, whose discombobulated scale reads as an ode to the Cubist tableau-objet. “I think about art history as this buffet you never get too full sampling from. The more you’re referencing, the more disparate those sources are, the richer, stranger and more delicious the thing you’ve created becomes.” (the artist quoted in: Simon Chilvers, “Louis Fratino Would Like to Get Intimate”, Financial t.mes s, 27 September 2024 (online))
From the delicate warping of spatial perspective to the stylistically contorted depiction of objects, Anemones and Mimosas illustrates Fratino’s technical virtuosity while poignantly capturing the emotive power of the moments and objects that linger in our consciousness. “Touch drives the work”, explains Fratino. “Often that is the physical touch between two people or maybe even the sensory touch of recognizing a surface or sensation, where even if the eyes are a bit larger or the color is not naturalistic, there is something there that makes you believe in what you’re looking at.” (the artist quoted in: Brian Keith Jackson, "Body of Work," Art Basel Magazine, December 2021, Miami Beach, pp. 176, 178) A dynamic and alluring tableau, Anemones and Mimosas invites the viewer into an intimate and seductive world, deftly representing queer embodiment in the gestures of everyday contemporary life. Eloquent, playful, and achingly tender, Anemones and Mimosas represents the apogee of Louis Fratino’s celebrated practice.
