Satura

The first institutional monograph of the American painter Louis Fratino (b. 1993), published with the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato: a decade of paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculpture keyed to the artist's relationship with Italy.

Produced for Fratino's exhibition at the Centro Pecci (September 26, 2024 to February 2, 2025) and expanded in this updated edition with the new works made for the show, the volume gathers 96 color and 20 black-and-white plates plus a folded poster, with texts by curator Stefano Collicelli Cagol, Giorgio Di Domenico, Filippo Bosco, Chiara Portesine, and Michele Bertolino. The title draws on the Latin lanx satura, the ritual dish heaped with first fruits, and the Italian sense of "saturated": an apt description of paintings that compress landscape, still life, and the male body into dense, erotically charged interiors.

Fratino, born in Annapolis, Maryland, and based in Brooklyn, has become one of the most closely watched figurative painters of his generation, folding the lessons of Italian modernism into scenes of queer domestic life. His work appeared in the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Hammer Museum, among others.