Artworks

Louis Fratino

American, b. 1993

Jamie, 2019

Oil on canvas

30 1/2 x 40 in. (77.47 x 101.60 cm)

© Louis Fratino, courtesy of Dr. Daniel S. Berger

Image courtesy of Ciaccia Levi, Paris

Here Fratino references 19^th-century French painter Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910), but once again shifts the narrative from that of a recumbent female nude in a timeless natural setting to one that is contemporary, temporal, and tailor-made for the gay gaze. Rousseau’s jungle becomes bedroom wallpaper and the light sources shift from Rousseau’s full moon to the light of the city coming through the apartment window behind the reclining male and from the lamp at his bedside. The figure is branded Queer by the Versace jock strap and bunched gym socks on display beside him, both symbols and markers in a gay lexicon.