George Orwell laid out some rules for writing, and although they don’t directly relate to Louis Fratino’s stunning exhibition Prose at David Zwirner in London, I was thinking a lot about language and words as I walked through the show alone on Wednesday afternoon. In his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), Orwell gives six short rules. Roughly: don’t use a stale metaphor you’ve seen in print a hundred times, use the short word when it works, cut any word you can cut, prefer the active voice, and avoid jargon or foreign phrases when an everyday word will do. The last rule is to break any of the others rather than write something ugly. To me, this is still one of the best short guides to plain prose. And when I walked into Fratino’s show, one about the poetry of belonging, the messy beauty of lust and love, the romance of family and togetherness, and the boldness of the body, I found myself thinking that sometimes the simplest moments in life are the ones we want to make paintings about.
I think what makes Fratino’s work so tender, fragile, and bold is that these are paintings we can relate to, paintings of the words we have loved in literature. This is where they come from: that tradition of modernist literature in which the meaning of art felt like it was expanding while the moments it captured were almost mundane. It was buying flowers for a party. It was a single day walking around Dublin. The stage is simple, but the intent is vast.
“I see art history not as made up of singular geniuses and their acolytes, but as something much richer and stranger.… I try to set up collisions between things in order to uncover newness,” Fratino told Frieze this year. I think we should look at his paintings through that lens of expansion, where the known becomes a new unknown. Painting is a centuries-old practice, but sometimes a painter comes along who expands its perspective in a way that makes the form exciting again. That is where I feel Prose lies. —Evan Pricco
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