Antoine Levi, Paris

Louis Fratino’s (1993, lives in New York) passionate observations of friends and relatives have a fictive, allegorical quality. His fields of vivid color and his expressive style recall early Modernist portraiture, although his interpretations of the male form mine a visual history that goes back at least to ancient Greece. He pictures an intimate realm of subjectivity and desire that the outside world in filtrates only through refraction and sublimation. For Art-O-Rama 2019, Fratino presents a new series of drawings inspired by Jean Cocteau’s, in which the very linear and delicate shapes engage with the depiction of the private and domestic spaces through the prism of a underlying nostalgia.

Lisetta Carmi (1924, lives in Cisternino, Italy) is among the major artists on the Italian scene and an international photographer. She was the first artist to document an Italian LGBTQ community in the early 60’s. She narrated and humanized marginalized groups in the middle of the twentieth century in her home town Genoa and its surroundings, then traveling the world seeking for the truth, deliberately ignoring social-political taboos. For Art- O-Rama 2019 the gallery will display a diptych from her most notable 1960’s series “I Travestiti”, in which everyday scenes from transvestites and transsexuals in Genoa are depicted. As the contemporary cultural conversation on gender identity is becoming more and more complex, this specific series carries an even more significant impact nowadays.

Ola Vasiljeva (1981, lives in The Netherlands) will be presenting two installations composed by ready made carpets on which the artist affixed silkscreen drawings, whose shapes refer to a playful stream of associations between eroticism and mischievous patterns. Indeed, despite the apparent absurdness, the two installations present images of the aubergines, a recurrent pattern in Modernist still-lives paintings, that Vasiljeva diverts as sexually loaded ornaments that emblazon a common and familiar decoration object such as rugs, turning them into the canvases or the theaters (playgrounds) of actions.