Spotlight: Louis Fratino

JANUARY 2-FEBRUARY 8, 2025

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Louis Fratino’s The pure and the impure, 2024. A text by poet and writer Robert Glück accompanies the presentation.

The Purple Men, 2025
By Robert Glück

It’s the weekend, Trent blasts Norman Fucking Rockwell again and again till Darrell asks for quiet. After great sex, he and Darrell drift into their private thoughts.  Listen, one way from Darrell and another from Trent. 

Trent: We occur in the ephemeral, but now the ephemeral also lasts, like a post on Instagram. Of course we have aged, but not as flesh and blood. More like a saying that dropped out of the vernacular, like “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” 

Daryl: Twenty minutes ago, we were the joyous center of a war-torn world. Trent’s intricate lower back and the soft flesh of his ass gave me pangs of tender lust.  We beheld each other in solemn awe in the temple of our rumpled bed. Here is excess, here is overflow. Some dam broke, a gush of saliva.  It’s great to be homosexual in this context. Then inner necessity dissolved, leaving a puzzle. There was a cock, and that cock wanted to be inside…. There was a hole, and that hole was urgent to be filled…. I suppose Trent is the temple prostitute, meaning no disrespect. He’s the kind of disciple who satisfies everyone.

Trent: It’s an unusual morning. If there’s going to be dissatisfaction, it’s usually on Darrell’s side, the side of mixed emotions. He was inside me twenty minutes ago. Daylight gave our story a gutsy plausibility. Now he’s transported by a blue light, an oracle that blathers depressing riddles about the future. Now Darrell is exaggerated and blurred. The beam penetrates our bedroom like an alien invader who teaches a phony lesson while launching an obliterating assault. Our sex was not obscure, it was clear, as though I climbed into an app named Trent. I’m united with event. Why doesn’t Darrell scroll through Grindr or Sniffies like a normal man? Instead, he suffers the shocks and breaking news of the Drudge Report, TikTok, or tries to—    

Darrell: Fuck you, Siri! This internet room is vast because I experience a lot of loss.

Trent: When Darrell is not outraged by the crimes of the commodity, he’s shopping for the cheese-grater with the best reviews.  Listen, the liquid trill of an oriel, as though our story turns inside its call. A moment to consider. Should I masturbate to expel the tension? 

Darrell: I climb to the top of my anger as though it’s a mountain peak. Listen, a horn blares, froths, clatters, clanks, bumps, slops. When I was younger, I daydreamed that I vanquished our enemies with the weapon of language. I was accuracy. I described their crimes so exactly that they couldn’t breathe. My voice—rising, rising—combated injustice in clarion disdain. Dictators cringed and acknowledged and succumbed with a cry of recognition. Their guilt, suddenly visible, dragged them into darkness. Now language falls away, irrelevant, while words carry too much power. I am just as likely to dispatch my target with a sniper’s bullet. What changed in my dreams and in my culture? 

Trent: All this turmoil is a distraction—from what? On the one hand, language doesn’t matter, on the other hand, words have too much power. Should I text Ray, a man who “speaks to me”? Sucking Ray’s cock—so bitter it scalded a star on my tongue, but also somehow opened the whole sky. “Speaks to me” is an odd expression to describe encounters with so little talking, but sex is a language, right? 

Ray is the third corner of their thruple, a little top who smells like a new car and walks on his toes even though he’s wearing sneakers. He’s a smaller, younger version of Darrell. Darrell met him when he walked in on Ray and Trent. Darrell was embarrassed, Ray’s nakedness was at least partly clothed by/in Trent’s ass. Trent was laughing, but is anal ever light-hearted? What would Collette say? Opening your ass is a psychic expense, right? Trent wants to be fragrant. He farts—the smell reaches Darrell, who says ow! as though he was punched. 

Trent: Am I different? It’s not just cybersex, but also compulsive information searches, like everyone else. The screen gives reality to our musty sheets littered with brass weapons. Every Saturday morning at 10:30, my phone tallies my weekly hours as though to shame me. But I am also faithful, I search for men who resemble Darrell. Flesh and blood distract me. Hardly a distraction—what can distract from flesh and blood? Oh, maybe parties where drugs addle our flesh. 

Trent reads Darrell’s mind without trying. Still, it startles him when Darrell cries: The only way for the world to regain its sanity is to tax the rich.

Trent: Everything seems inconsequential, but I don’t have a problem with that. My nipples feel quiet. And the serious navel orange with its dry membrane and penetrating flavor and deep sparkle. 

Darrell: Is the temple of intimacy ever private? A temple is a public space. 

Trent: Somehow, we are wasting good suffering. What do I mean by that? Darrell, how can we live?—In a home. A home that works, a home that is tender in a minimal voice, a home that is home and the recreation of home, where we cross a line we want to cross, the blur of me and not me where we cook my mother’s stew, fuck, clean our bodies, watch TV and sleep. The fortress of our queer soul. Where the fridge fills and the trash empties. Where we endure what we can’t survive and what we choose to suffer. This is home, sweet musty sheets. This is home: fabric, wood, gas, lath and plaster, bricks, concrete, stainless steel, paper, glass and clay. 

Listen, the fat lady is singing. 

About:

Louis Fratino (b. 1993, Annapolis, MD) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Fratino received his BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015. His first institutional solo exhibition, Louis Fratino. Satura, is currently on view at Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy through May 11, 2025. Other recent solo exhibitions include In bed and abroad, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY (2023); Louis Fratino, Litografia Bulla, Rome, Italy (2023), and Die bunten Tage, Galerie Neu, Berlin (2022). Fratino was featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Fratino’s work is in the collections of The Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Fratino is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014.

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and New Narrative theorist and is Emeritus Professor of San Francisco State University. He was the director of San Francisco State's Poetry Center, and co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center. In addition, Glück worked as associate editor of Lapis Press. He is the recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship 2002 and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant 2003. He is the author of the story collections, Elements (Four Seasons Foundation, 1982, and Ithuriel's Spear, 2013) and Denny Smith (Clear Cut Press, 2003); the novels, Jack the Modernist (GPNY, 1985, and High Risk/Serpent's Tail, 1995), Margary Kempe (High Risk/Serpent's Tail, 1994, and New York Review Books, 2020), and About Ed (New York Review Books, 2023); and a volume of collected essays Communal Nude (Semiotext(e), 2016).  His books of poetry include La Fontaine (Black Star Series, 1981) with Bruce Boone, Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), In Commemoration of the Visit (Further Other Book Works, 2016) with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox (Roof Books, 2023). In 2025 New York Review Books will republish Jack the Modernist.  

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