Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Louis Fratino is one of the few contemporary artists who truly understands what it means to inhabit a body. Not just to possess a body, but to fully inhabit it, with all its sensations, desires, and vulnerabilities. When observing his work, we are confronted with a pictorial phenomenology that evokes the greatest intuitions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty about our relationship to the world through flesh. Fratino reminds us that the true mission of art is to make us feel our own corporeality. His work is not merely a celebration of the male body or homoeroticism – that would be a terribly reductive reading – but a deep exploration of what it means to be embodied in a world where virtuality and distance have become our second nature.
Flesh in Fratino’s work is never anonymous. It always bears a name, a story, an intimacy. Whether he paints a sleeping lover in “Four Poster Bed” (2021) or intertwined bodies in “Kissing Couple” (2019), each subject is both specific and universal. Look at how he treats physical details – hair, folds, joints – with an attention that transforms anatomy into emotional topography. Critic Roberta Smith perfectly captured this quality when she wrote that his paintings are “warm with the pleasure of the domesticity of hanging around at home, of shared intimacy. And they are also warm with pictorial attention and erudition – inviting a similar examination on the part of the viewer. Almost every brushstroke and mark, every detail of furniture and body hair has a life of its own.”[1]
This engagement with the phenomenology of the body is not without precedent in the history of art. But where Fratino stands out is in his ability to merge this preoccupation with a radical reevaluation of modernist traditions. He does not simply imitate Picasso, Matisse, or Hartley – he digests and reconfigures them through the prism of a contemporary queer experience. Take “I keep my treasure in my ass” (2019), a title borrowed from Mario Mieli’s book “Towards a Gay Communism”. The work depicts the artist giving birth to himself through his rectum – a powerful visual metaphor that transforms an organ often reduced to its sexual or scatological function into a site of identity creation and self-generation.
This canvas, exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale, perfectly illustrates how Fratino deploys a modernist vocabulary – faces in cubist geometry, expressionist distortions of the body – to articulate an experience that modernists like Picasso, despite their genius, would never have dared to express. A critic noted that in front of this work, “people almost queued to stand in front of this painting – then grimaced or had physical reactions.”[2] This visceral reaction is precisely what Merleau-Ponty described as “the flesh of the world” – this moment where our perception and the perceived world meet in a dance of mutual recognition.
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology teaches us that we are not disembodied minds observing the world from the outside, but embodied beings, integrated into the very fabric of reality. Our body is not just an object among other objects, but our means of having a world. Fratino seems to understand this truth at an instinctual level. In “Washing in the Sink,” a naked man washes after making love – a banal act transformed into a ritual of rehousing the body. It is not the sexual act that interests the artist here, but the moment that follows, when we become fully aware of our corporality again.
Merleau-Ponty writes in “Eye and Mind”: “The painter ‘brings his body,’ says Valéry. And indeed, it is hard to see how a Mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the painter changes the world into painting.”[3] Fratino certainly brings his body to each canvas, not as a narcissistic exercise, but as a phenomenological offering. His painting technique itself – the thick materiality of his paint, his textured brushstrokes, his palette alternating between earthy warmth and oceanic coolness – reflects this concern for the lived experience of the body.
This phenomenological approach extends beyond explicitly erotic scenes to encompass all aspects of embodied existence. Fratino’s still lifes – like “My Meal” (2019) or “Polaroids on the kitchen counter” (2020) – reveal a similar sensitivity. Everyday objects – an egg on toast, a cherry tomato, scattered polaroids – are rendered with the same loving attention as nude bodies. For both Merleau-Ponty and Fratino, there is no ontological separation between the body and the world it inhabits; both are woven into the same fleshly fabric of reality.
“I like paintings to be crusty, thick, and bodily,” confesses the artist.[4] This statement reveals his commitment to painting that is not simply representation, but embodiment. His canvases do not merely show bodies; they are bodies themselves, with their own texture, weight, and presence.
What Fratino shares with Merleau-Ponty is the conviction that our relationship to the world is fundamentally prereflexive, grounded in sensory perception prior to any intellectual analysis. When we look at “Metropolitan” (2019), a scene of a gay bar where bodies intertwine in a compressed space, we do not simply “read” a representation of queer sociability; we viscerally feel the warmth, the closeness, the texture of this experience. The work speaks directly to our bodies, short-circuiting purely cognitive interpretation.
But Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is not merely a theory of perception; it is also a theory of intersubjectivity. Our body is not just what gives us access to the world, but also what allows us to recognize the other as a similar embodied subject. It is precisely this intersubjective dimension that Fratino explores in his portraits of lovers and friends. In “Me and Ray” or “Tom,” the gaze is never objectifying; it always recognizes the other as an embodied subject, with his own interiority.
As Merleau-Ponty writes in “Phenomenology of Perception”: “The body of another is not an object for me, nor mine for him… It is another way of being body.”[5] The figures in Fratino’s paintings are never reduced to objects of desire; they always retain their mystery, their autonomy. Even in the most explicitly sexual scenes, like “Kiss” where one man practices anulingus on another, there is a recognition of the other as a subject.
This intersubjective recognition extends beyond sexual partners to include family. In “My sister’s boys,” Fratino paints two naked boys framed by a dark doorway. This work could easily be misinterpreted in our hyper-vigilant culture, but as the title indicates, they are his nephews. By painting them in this way, Fratino refuses the excessive sexualization of childhood nudity while recognizing that children are also embodied beings. He establishes a continuity between all forms of embodiment – that of the lover, the friend, the child – without reducing them to the same level.
This phenomenological approach resonates particularly in the Italian context where the exhibition “Satura” is held. In a country where the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni has imposed severe restrictions on gay parents, even going so far as to remove some lesbian mothers from their children’s birth certificates, Fratino’s paintings become acts of phenomenological resistance. They assert that bodily experience transcends categories imposed by the state or religion.
Fratino himself recognizes this political dimension, while refusing to reduce it to an explicit message: “I felt a lot of pressure knowing the political situation in Italy, how difficult it is for queer people to have a family. There may have been a responsibility on my part to create something that was very clear about its position. But in the end, that’s not how I paint. I create a work intuitively or unconsciously, never very clear about its point of view. It’s about being in a lived life.”[6]
This insistence on “lived life” rather than ideological posture is profoundly phenomenological. For Merleau-Ponty, experience always precedes theorizing; our being-in-the-world is always richer and more ambiguous than our attempts to conceptualize it. Similarly, Fratino’s paintings are never reducible to a political message, even when they inevitably situate themselves in a political context.
This approach has sometimes earned Fratino criticism, particularly for his supposed lack of representation of transgender or racially marginalized individuals. His response is revealing: “The paintings have an audience, but when I make them, they have none. It’s me talking to myself, so I do not have obligations toward an idea of community in my own studio, which is the only private and sacred space I have in the world.”[7] This affirmation of the studio as a primordial phenomenological space, where the artist engages in an embodied dialogue with his own experience, resonates deeply with Merleau-Ponty’s thought.
For both the philosopher and the artist, truth is not an abstract construction imposed on the world, but a revelation that emerges from our bodily engagement with it. Fratino works “intuitively or unconsciously,” allowing his body painting to converse with the world rather than impose a preconceived vision. As he explains: “Painting is a pleasure and I want it to stay that way. How would you render skin? How would you render wood? Or this paper rather than that? It’s pure color, it’s texture – and I take a lot of pleasure in trying to solve these puzzles.”[8]
This joy in solving the material “puzzles” of painting recalls what Merleau-Ponty called “the interrogation of painting” – this way in which visual art poses questions to the visible that conceptual philosophy cannot. When Fratino asks how to render skin or wood, it is not simply a technical problem but an ontological inquiry into the very nature of these substances, how they appear to our embodied consciousness.
Critic Durga Chew-Bose grasped this quality when she wrote that “Fratino’s lunar gaze at the erotic is focused on details that excite otherwise banal perspectives.”[9] This attention to sensory details that transform the mundane into revelation is at the heart of the phenomenological approach. For Merleau-Ponty, the miracle of perception is precisely its ability to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary, to make us see the world as if it were for the first time.
Fratino shares this fascination for the transfigured ordinary. His paintings of domestic scenes – breakfast, rest, reading – are imbued with a quality of presence that elevates them beyond the quotidian without detaching them from it. In “Garden at Dusk” (2024), a man dozes at a table while another tends to flowers in the background. This seemingly banal scene becomes a meditation on different forms of bodily habitation of the world – surrendering to sleep on one side, tactile engagement with plants on the other.
This transfiguration of the everyday is rooted in a long pictorial tradition, from Vermeer to Bonnard, which Fratino recognizes as an influence. But where he stands out is in his ability to infuse this tradition with a contemporary queer sensitivity without reducing it to a mere identity politics. As Harry Tafoya notes, his paintings are “less concerned with formal questions than with the ecstasy of capturing fleeting glimpses of alternative states of being and pursuing them towards the light.”[10]
This pursuit of light is literal in many of Fratino’s works, where natural light plays a major role. In “Waking up first, hard morning light” (2020), rays of morning sun transform an ordinary scene – a sleeping man – into a phenomenological revelation. This concern for light echoes Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on Cézanne’s painting, where light is not just an optical phenomenon but a manifestation of the “flesh of the world.”
For Fratino, this light has a specific personal and geographical quality. “In summer, the light is the light of Maryland,” he says, referring to his home state.[11] This observation resonates with what Merleau-Ponty calls “style” – this unique way that each body inhabits and perceives the world. Our perception is never neutral or universal; it is always colored by our embodied history, our memories, our perceptual habits.
The Merleau-Pontian notion of “style” also helps understand Fratino’s eclectic painting approach. His work freely mixes modernist influences – Picasso, Matisse, Hartley, De Pisis – without ever falling into pastiche or sterile citation. These influences are thoroughly assimilated, transformed by his own perceptual “style.” As he explains: “I think painting is always about reinterpreting, or recycling, something you have seen before. In my case, specifically, I would like to borrow the composition or the subject from modernism, Picasso or Matisse, but reimagining the figures as people I know intimately.”[12]
This reimagining radically transforms the modernist vocabulary. Picasso’s cubist bodies, often marked by a violent objectification of the female body, become in Fratino’s work sites of intersubjective recognition among men. Orientalist odalisques are reconfigured as contemporary gay men in their own domestic space, subverting the tradition of the heterosexual male gaze. As Joseph Henry observes, “If a gay sensibility keeps modernism intact, a queer variant addresses its shortcomings, exploits its strategies to their fullest, or relegates modernism to a mere historical category.”[13]
Fratino oscillates between these positions, sometimes maintaining modernism intact, sometimes radically subverting it. But what remains constant is his commitment to an embodied phenomenology of the everyday. His paintings are never merely exercises in style or intellectual commentary on art history; they are always rooted in lived experience.
As Merleau-Ponty wrote: “The phenomenological world is not the explicitation of a prior being, but the foundation of being.”[14] Likewise, Fratino’s canvases are not an explanation of a pre-existing reality, but the creation of a perceptual world in which new possibilities of being emerge. His naked men do not simply “represent” contemporary homoeroticism; they establish a phenomenological space where desire among men becomes a legitimate mode of being-in-the-world.
This phenomenological foundation explains why Fratino’s works have provoked such strong reactions, both positive and negative. His upcoming exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa was canceled when he insisted on including “New Bedroom,” depicting two naked men having sex. What surprised him was not so much the potential offense but “the fear there might be. I find it really sad because it demonstrated a really low expectation of the community who might have celebrated this.”[15]
This anecdote reveals the persistent power of embodied art to disturb established norms. In an increasingly virtual and disembodied culture, where bodily experience is either commodified or erased, Fratino’s resolutely carnal paintings constitute a phenomenological act of resistance. They insist that the body – in all its sexual, sensual, and social specificity – remains the primordial site of our being-in-the-world.
This resistance is not simply political or identity-based; it is ontological. In “Phenomenology of Perception,” Merleau-Ponty writes: “I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body.”[16] This radical statement perfectly summarizes what Fratino’s paintings invite us to recognize: that we are not disembodied minds observing our bodies from the outside, but fundamentally embodied beings whose entire experience is shaped and made possible by our bodily existence.
In a world where digital virtuality and conceptual abstraction increasingly dominate our experience, this phenomenological recognition becomes an almost revolutionary act. Fratino’s paintings, with their sensual celebration of flesh, texture, light, and bodily intimacy, remind us of what we risk losing when we drift too far from our grounding in the material world.
But they also offer us a vision of what a more fully embodied existence could be – an existence where pleasure, tenderness, sensory curiosity, and intersubjective recognition would not be exceptions but the norm. As the artist himself writes: “There is a search for a beautiful life in painting – I think I use painting to get closer to it.”[17]
This quest for a “beautiful life” through phenomenological engagement with the world resonates deeply with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project. For him as for Fratino, the goal is not simply to theorize or represent the world, but to inhabit it more fully, more consciously, more sensually.
Louis Fratino’s paintings invite us to rediscover our own flesh, not as an object we possess, but as the very means by which we have a world. They remind us that our body is not simply a receptacle of sensations or an instrument of desire, but the very site of our being, the point where we and the world meet and mutually create each other. In an artistic landscape often dominated by abstract conceptualization or superficial provocation, this phenomenological invitation may be Fratino’s most precious and enduring contribution to contemporary art.
- Roberta Smith, cited in “Louis Fratino”, Wikipedia.
- Alex Needham, “I can’t wait to paint myself when I’m old and knobbly: the sensual world of Louis Fratino”, artist interview.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, éditions Gallimard, 1964.
- Simon Chilvers, “Louis Fratino would like to get intimate”, The Financial Times, September 27, 2024.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology of Perception”, editions Gallimard, 1945.
- Alex Needham, “I can’t wait to paint myself when I’m old and knobbly: the sensual world of Louis Fratino”, The Guardian, October 29, 2024.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Durga Chew-Bose, “Openings: Louis Fratino”, Artforum, March 2021.
- Harry Tafoya, “Paintings of Friends and Lovers Whose Inner Lives Glow Around Them”, Hyperallergic, May 16, 2019.
- Durga Chew-Bose, “Openings: Louis Fratino”, Artforum, March 2021.
- Stefano Pirovano, “Rising artists to watch: Louis Fratino”, Rising artists to watch: Louis Fratino, Conceptual Fine Arts, February 20, 2018.
- Joseph Henry, “Love and Loneliness: Queering Modernisms in Figurative Painting”, Momus, August 1, 2019.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology of Perception”, editions Gallimard, 1945.
- Alex Needham, “I can’t wait to paint myself when I’m old and knobbly: the sensual world of Louis Fratino”, The Guardian, October 29, 2024.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology of Perception”, editions Gallimard, 1945.
- Alex Needham, “I can’t wait to paint myself when I’m old and knobbly: the sensual world of Louis Fratino”, The Guardian, October 29, 2024.
