The Revolutionary Gaze of Louis Fratino

You’ve met him before. He’s muscled and languid, reclining on a couch. His legs are folded apart (“butterfly pose”). You met him on Grindr. Or at the corner of 14th and First. You commented on his shoes. He’s not wearing any now. He’s not wearing anything. This man has “big dick energy,” as the guys at The Cock always say. His dick hangs free against his thigh. Is it hard? You can’t tell. He just sits there in silent repose, inside himself, but fully there. You wonder what catches his attention from across the room, or what memory he ruminates on. It is not common to see men like this. He is both vulnerable and tough, naked yet fully-clothed. How is this possible? He would not draw you so close if it weren’t for this mystery. This man is a riddle that you cannot solve. But then, we’re all riddles to each other, a glib truth. Cet homme, c’est moi.

That’s a lie. This man isn’t you. He isn’t me. He’s “Andrea of Gambara” (2018), one of Louis Fratino’s many portraits that have emerged since his 2019 break-out show, “Come Softly to Me.” Fratino has made himself known as an artist who demolishes dominant tropes about the body, and how these bodies coalesce in space. He is young, 27, and commands social media with millennial ease. Many discover Fratino on Instagram, where he fills his account with sketches and paintings. So far, we might characterize his work as “casually erotic,” and these words pull equal weight. In a recent Instagram post, a man lies on a bed, checking his phone. This scene might not steal our attention were he not completely naked, soft cock on thick thigh. In a Fratino sleight of hand, what appears to be quotidian actually contains unfettered possibility.

What kind of possibility is this? The erotic performs an intervention. For there exists a universal truth: queer media lacks eros. It is bland. It is commercial. And what is eros? Not pornography, which Audre Lorde writes “is the suppression of true feeling…sensation without feeling.” Grindr and YouPorn. Looking. But this applies to heteros, too. Does Netflix make you feel alive? Candy Crush? We exist in aesthetic paradigms that deny us true feeling, and so the erotic has revolutionary force. It “widens feeling,” to borrow George Eliot. And It’s even more urgent now, as we pull away from each other and into our phones. Alas, quarantine has been a long time coming. If Fratino has a revolutionary consciousness, it is because his erotic portraits give us access to worlds beyond the here and now. He shows us scenes of homoerotic aliveness that intercede our precarious, capitalist present. He startles us awake. We come alive.

But he does so via the male body. Naked. Half-clothed. Women do appear, but his primary concern is the imaginative possibilities of male forms. In “Grapefruit Breakfast” (2017) two men sit at a thick, wooden table. Neither look older than 25. One man with a beard faces us. He squeezes a grapefruit in his fist. Juice dribbles into a bowl. He looks at the man next to him, whose lips are parted. This man takes dainty sips of an unknown liquid (Coffee? Orange Juice?) Our eyes move beneath the table. Bearded guy’s hand is right next to the other guy’s dick — flaccid, uncut. Fratino electrifies this quotidian moment with erotic possibility. These bodies are naked in the John Berger sense: they are naked to each other, vulnerable. Yet they aren’t nude, which for Berger meant modulating oneself for an observer — the male gaze, the male gays. This vulnerability, raw and masculine, is what draws us to these portraits in the first place.

Never call them domestic, these portraits. Yes, Fratino depicts private spaces: a sofa, a bed, the dining room table. But domestic shares its root with domesticate: to tame, live in a family. And what we often call “heteronormative” is the taming of the erotic energies that shine through Fratino’s canvas. What does Fratino’s use of eros contribute to his subject matter? I see within these tender portraits an intervention that we have call upon Marx to fully unpack. These men are, well, unalienated. Radically together. They are the opposite of Marx’s worker, who “only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.” Marx locates alienation in the body. At work, our bodies are not our own, and what we make with our bodies is not our own. The worker “only feels himself freely active in his animal functions — eating, drinking, procreating…and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.”

At work, I feel freest on my lunch break, or on the toilet, scrolling through Grindr. Eating, shitting, fucking. And yet none of these things humanize me. They diminish my spirit, numb my senses. They stimulate me, but tire me out. Sound familiar? Capitalism sucks the life from us like a giant leech. And when I look at these paintings, I feel brought back to myself, which is to say that Fratino restores to the body a sense of wonder. But his paintings aren’t just a conceptual exercise. And again, they’re not pornography, which implies a crass commodification. Not at all. His paintings are a radical de-commodification. These male bodies soar with life. They depict what Marx called our “species-being” — the fulfillment of our fullest physical, emotional, and social potential, after we have freed ourselves from wage-labor and the dead time of capital.

I see Fratino’s work express a queer sort of Marxism, where the erotic is a vehicle for imagining otherwise. Take “Andrea in Gambara,” (2018), the painting I opened with. Andrea is both Eros and Apollo, body and mind, animal and human, all synthesized. Andrea is a species-being, not a laboring body, something owned. He is queer. He exists outside and against capitalist modes of exploitation, a system that robs us of our bodies and subdues our intellects. Fratino lends artistic imagination to what “queer” could mean, and has rescued it from the abyss of commodification. Contrast Fratino with the queer culture industry, shows like Queer Eye, which reduce “queer” to an identity, a digestible product. Queers exist only to decorate the precious prisons of straight couples. You can fuck a man and not be queer, just as you can be queer and fuck the opposite sex. Queerness is opposition to capitalism’s aesthetic paradigms. Or a reclamation. It is the refusal to be captured, known. It is fugitive. Queerness in this sense always implicates blackness.

Fratino is not black. But he imbues queerness with fugitivity. These bodies exist outside the hetero gaze. They exist for themselves and each other, not as perky servants. No Gay Best Friends here. No white, airbrushed covers of DNA, which express a kind of queerness I find boring and offensive. It’s too clean. Too sterile. There’s revolution to be found in smut, the touch of bodies, sweaty dicks and hairy chests. (Be honest: you prefer this.) Just look at Fratino’s “Beach Night” (2017). We don’t see a beach. No sand. But bodies overlap with other bodies, men and women. Each exist on their own, gazing up and down, yet also together. A woman stands to the far right. She clasps her stomach. She’s pregnant. Fratino’s primary focus is the male body, but he doesn’t dispense with the feminine. He’s not Tom of Finland, whose raunchy drawings gave visual expression to gay sex cultures. No. Something else is happening here.

Fratino escapes the charge of misogyny (which Tom of Finland does not) because his visual universe sanctifies both the feminine and the masculine. Take another look at “Beach at Night.” See the two men walking together? They’re both wearing green short-shorts. They’re not your average husky hunks, grizzly guys, or burly bros. They’re just two young men, bodies average. Fratino emphasizes soft lines and edges. He draws heavily upon the kings of modernism — Picasso and Matisse. This softness lends to the male form a faint femininity. Fratino magnifies various body parts, and thus we feel what it is like to touch that man’s tender ass. Fratino’s work is thus multisensory. Looking at “Beach at Night,” I not only see these men. I touch them. And touch leads to taste, taste to smell — the open ocean. It’s salty stink.

Fratino hijacks modernism like a car by the roadside. We’d charge him for grand theft auto if the ride weren’t so thrilling. He takes us on his route, even if we already know the automobile inside and out. That’s the beauty of form. You can do what you like in its predetermined borders. Where’s he taking us? Fratino is well-aware of queerness and its discontents. At a 2017 panel, he worried about commodification. Now “gay people do yoga and they have really beautiful domestic spaces” — domestic! — “And I feel like my work can sometimes be viewed as a product of that.” Yes, it could. To the lazy viewer. “Beach Night,” like so many other Fratino portraits, is erotic, because it holds in tension sexual ecstasy and emotional proximity. A man’s delicate face, his loose cock. These elements clash, resulting in a kind of queer transcendence.

I have used “erotic” thus far to name Fratino’s intervention into bourgeois love. Though I’ve never heard people describe these fierce portraits as loving, I see love everywhere. If you were raised on Disney, then you were taught that love is pleasant and boring, where feeling narrows rather than widens. Chug a liter of Nyquil, and you experience what Disney wants you to believe love is. We don’t want to know what happens to Cinderella after Prince Boring whisks her away. And what about Pocahontas after she rescues John “Settler-Colonial” Smith from the chopping block? Disney doesn’t care! Love is love! A sanitized and soporific thing. On the other hand, we are taught that the erotic is impersonal, two bodies fucking, as meaningful and desirable as drilling for crude oil. This hegemonic binary severs the body from the spirit. We are alienated.

Well, this isn’t exactly right. This isn’t the 1950s anymore. So much has changed. And yet, so much hasn’t. Many who live in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Seattle, say that they value queerness — “I watch RuPaul!” — but have the weakest grasp of its revolutionary possibilities. They think it’s just an individual expression of sexual unorthodoxy, what Normcore was to high fashion. If one works for Goldman Sachs, owns three homes, or invests in Google, they aren’t queer, though they might list “polyamorous” on Grindr. Our attempts to escape the normative lead us right back into its hegemonic grasp. The anti-normative is a new normative, a moral imperative, dispensed to us in the bureaucratic lingo of human resource offices. Queerness becomes an anti-septic, Disney thing, reduced to preferences that you must tick off on a survey: “I go to sex parties!” “I like leather!” Good for you. But again, queerness is always a mystery to itself. Fugitive. Erotic.

What ultimate value does the erotic have, then? What does it do for Fratino’s men? For us? The power of eros is something that Plato passed down. It percolates through the work of Herbert Marcuse, Audre Lorde, and José Esteban Muñoz. In “My Meal” (2019), Fratino offers us a quiet argument about eros. We see a table covered with drawings, some eggs and toast, and a copy of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism. This is a private space — a dining table, the very stuff of bourgeois domesticity — but suggests that revolution lurks beneath the tablecloth. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse synthesizes Marx and Freud — “FreudoMarxism” — to argue that liberating eros is the primary path to liberating society. He asserts that life beyond capitalism is “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”

The erotic has a Marxist resonance, if we think of it as a new set of relations that transcend capitalist production. Fratino selects Mieli as his preferred theorist. Mieli was a leading figure in the 1970s Italian Gay movement. He theorized at a time when FreudoMarxism informed a lot of revolutionary struggle. In Towards a Gay Communism, Mieli argues that “the liberation of Eros and the emancipation of the human race pass necessarily — and this is a gay necessity — through the liberation of homoeroticism.” We can see traces of Marcuse here. But Mieli transposes the erotic onto the homoerotic, which must be liberated from bourgeois norms. He argues that homoerotic liberation will lead “to the transformation of homosexuality, which body is still in large part subject to the dictatorship of the Norm.” The dictatorship of the Norm! Please cherish Mieli’s lexicon. He doesn’t want to have a decorous discussion about “heteronormativity” and “cis-privilege.” No. The stakes are too high. He wants to demolish a fucking dictatorship.

As does Fratino. Or so it seems. Maybe I’m digging too far beneath the canvas. But “Beach at Night” and “My Meal,” makes me think about Mieli’s “transformation of homosexuality.” And what does this transformation augur? Mieli’s central problem is that capitalism coopts “perversions,” which are then sold back to us (Queer Eye, The Advocate, et. al.). He combines Marxism and psychoanalysis to say that liberation requires a “transsexual synthesis,” in which “the species will have (re)found itself.” This synthesis is the overcoming of gender itself, which is the rediscovery of our species-being. Mieli believes that we experience class through sexuality. Homosexuality and heterosexuality, not labor and capital, are the central dialectic that we have to overcome in the name of liberation. Critics might lump Mielli in with other social movements of the sixties and seventies, like Second Wave feminism. That’s the fashionable and sloppy thing to do. But Mieli offers us a program that’s more revolutionary, more radical than many so-called queer movements today: liberation from capitalism via transsexuality. Sign me up.

Doctrinaire Marxists might label this a “bourgeois distraction,” but we cannot discount that Fratino’s work contains a mystical element. Yes, he hijacks modernism. But I also see Vedic iconography, Kama Sutra, in “Kissing Couple” (2019). This painting is also a multisensory experience. Two men are in missionary position. We know what that man felt like on top us, inside of us. We taste him, his lips. Again, Fratino restores to sex an erotic potency. This isn’t just your namby-pamby missionary crap. Nor is it a joyless Grindr fuck. The sex here is enigmatic, two bodies as one. But it’s also entirely physical. To borrow Marcuse, “Two Bodies” shows us a “fundamentally different experience of being.” Fratino routes this Marcusian insight through Vedic iconography. Eros is mystical. Fratino escapes the charge of cultural appropriation, because his work reinvigorates this ancient form with contemporary resonance. It is an homage. Fratino calls upon the past to imagine the future. Maybe this is life after capitalism.

Vedic art appears congruent with Mieli’s “transsexual synthesis.” But Fratino shows us no such synthesis. These portraits do not overcome gendered expressions of self. Rather, the feminine shines through the masculine, a pentimento. The former enhances the latter in a paradoxical way. Fratino offers us a resolution to capitalist cooptation, but one in which men are still men. He gives visual expression to male coexistence after capitalism. A soft face against a pillow, a luscious ass, a tender cock. If it weren’t such a clunky term, we could label this queer aesthetic “counterhegemonic masculinity.” Other artists are expanding this vision beyond the lives of white men, visual artists like Jonathan Lyndon Chase and vocalists like Dev Hynes. Fratino’s men seemingly exist outside a political economy that tears us from our bodies and each other. They appear to us from outside a system that reduces love to deodorized intimacy, and eros to the soulless dick pic. We wish we could go there, too. We already know what love could be, what we could be, together. Fratino shows us what we’ve always felt, but have never found the words to describe.

This is Fratino’s brilliance, his revolutionary force. And his “Metropolitan” (2019) expresses this force with the most erotic potency. In this portrait, Fratino illustrates what Mieli believes will wake us: homoerotic liberation. Like “Beach at Night,” we see men against men. This time we’re on a dance-floor, under a strobe-light. This could be Berlin, where Fratino painted so many of these enchanting portraits. But it’s New York, the Metropolitan Bar on Lorimer Street. Look at “Metropolitan” for 10 minutes. Feel yourself there, there on the dance-floor. Men kiss each other, naked, rub their dicks together. Here is a collective frottage that we cannot fully see. Something revolutionary is happening on this canvas, as dynamic as the strobe-light illuminating this sweaty mass of men. And though we do not yet have a language for it, Fratino unlocks a world beyond the present, where we feel more and see more. Where we feel each other again, after so many months apart. Where feeling is thrown open, and we are queer.