Louis Fratino at Galerie Neu

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No one in a Fratino painting ever smiles. The highest emote is a cattle calm. Even the explicitly coital figures could also be sleeping. It's like the Wes Anderson school of emotion. Everyone is trapped behind style, artifice, and middle class ennui. Combine it with the painterly trend for lounging. Figures like cats in sunbeams, the same anatomy, tired. Canvases read like the word "languid" in all caps.  All the more if its in the nostalgic melange of modernism. Real comfortable genre. So it is surprising to find it works better in sculpture. That languid calm men in sculpture, after centuries of being women's role, is mildly refreshing. A simple genre switch, a key change, maybe it's easier to hear the Kouros. Maybe it is as simple as that it's rare to see a sculpture of man calmly holding a baby. Because everyone eats ass these days. Simply a somewhat new image, even vaguely.

See too: "The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, ... And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted."