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Louis Fratino is a New York–based painter whose work fuses personal memories with art historical references to explore queerness, intimacy, and love in gestures and scenes of everyday life. The oil painting Large Flowers foregrounds a bouquet of flowers arranged in a glass vase on a tabletop, behind which the artist himself appears in a small self-portrait. Presented at larger-than-life scale, the floral arrangement is an alluring and colorfully vibrant assortment of violets, carnations, poppies, and roses, each signifying ideas of beauty, sensuality, affection, and passion. Fratino typically begins his work from drawings that recall a particular mood or moment, and then expands upon these compositions in scale, form, and color during the painting process. While his color rich paintings are often likened to cubism (as well as other modernist styles), their tactile surfaces—finely scored and textured through the use of palette knives and scraping—convey a sense of touch, rawness, and labor. For Fratino, who experiences red-green color blindness, the dynamic tension in his compositions allows him to search for ways to represent the emotions and expressions of what he calls the “mysticism around painting, where you can manifest something through it, [whether] it’s something as simple as doing the dishes, or being in love with someone, or feeling close to your family.” Large Flowers invokes notions of intimacy and love through the sensual language of flowers, referencing the artist’s distinctive style and subject matter.

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Cinga Samson is a self-taught figurative painter, whose works on canvas evoke a haunting playfulness at the boundary between the real and the imaginary. Samson’s subject matter ranges from still lifes to portraits of young men, who often sport postures of luxury, confidence, and desire that are nonetheless infused with an otherworldly spirituality. The color, tone, and lighting in his canvases further this dynamic, creating a charged, enigmatic atmosphere within which his subjects linger, as though between states of reality and with a sense of quiet self-possession.

Samson’s subjects often appear to exist within their own worlds, holding themselves at a distance from the viewer while still open to the engagement of looking and being perceived. To emphasize this notion of distance and withholding, Samson deploys careful attention to the thickness and density of paint over his canvases, which create shifting registers of luminosity that transform the finished scenes into uncanny windows into another worldview. Okwe Nkunzana 2 is one in a group of paintings Samson made responding to feelings of loss, aggression, violence, and grief following the Covid-19 pandemic and the death of his father, among other personal events. According to the artist, the series title translates to “devil’s thorn,” a type of thorny plant common to South Africa, that also doubles as an Xhosa idiom for someone who is bothersome (i.e., a thorn in one’s side). In making this series, Samson turned to portraits of young men in haunting, discomforting scenes that suggest an eerie stillness or unresolved spirituality. In this painting, the subject emerges between two grounds—a gated domestic exterior in the background, and a garden tree rendered in silver in the foreground. Between the tree limbs stands a lone figure, dressed in a luxury jacket and peering back at the viewer with Samson’s signature all-white blank eyes, suggestive of a specter or a spiritual avatar. For Samson, the figure’s return of the gaze is an important aspect to the subversive tone of his portraits: “They’re present, they are there. You are starting to move toward them, and they are aware of your presence… . They seem to be saying that you need to be cautious, don’t get any closer.”

The precisely painted domestic interiors at the center of Philadelphia-based artist Becky Suss’s work ascribe meaningful value to historically undervalued spaces. Suss understands these spaces to be associated historically with women and children, and thus overlooked or deemed unimportant. The artist carefully attends to these spaces, painting them largely from memory in her sharp, flat, signature style, with exaggerated proportions to amplify the tension between fact and fiction that playfully animates these works.

8 Greenwood Place (1985–88) is from a series of painted portraits of Suss’s various childhood bedrooms. Though the interiors are devoid of figures, signs of the room’s dwellers abound: here, a Hula-Hoop, an origami fortune teller, polka-dot sneakers, and a magic eight ball indicate a child subject. At the center of the painting is a dollhouse perched on a table in front of a colorful, wall-mounted quilt patterned with tulips. In each of the house’s windows, Suss depicts interiors pulled from children’s books, such as Miss Rumphius (a slightly altered copy of which appears open and on the room’s floor), Where the Wild Things Are, and the series The Berenstain Bears. Children’s books have been a consistent source of inspiration for Suss, especially after becoming a parent herself and returning to the literature of her childhood. The series, then, looks back at childhood through an autobiographical lens, marking its many turns through Suss’s lived experiences and memories, and the objects that speak to growing up in a particular time and place. With 8 Greenwood Place (1985–88), Suss explores the intimate relationships that exist with a child’s bedroom and children’s literature, as spaces of imagination, possibility, and world building.

Boston-based Joe Wardwell draws on the rich resources of music, landscape, and American culture in his colorful paintings. Combining layers of painted acrylic images and texts in vivid, chromatic hues, his work highlights counterculture narratives in American cultural memory and their relationship to nationalism, history, identity, and place. If You Got the Money Honey is from a cycle of paintings made by Wardwell in 2020 and 2021 in response to multiple intersecting crises of health, race, economics, and politics, and displays his signature layering of landscape and text. The artist’s first cityscape, this painting presents a view toward downtown Boston from Wardwell’s studio, located in Humphreys Street Studios in Dorchester’s Upham’s Corner. At the time, the studio building was threatened to be demolished by developers until Wardwell and other residents joined together to campaign against the sale of the building, ultimately reaching a unique partnership with the City of Boston and funders. Over this colorful skyline, the artist layers a series of texts. The largest text—lyrics from a Guns N’ Roses song—gives the work its title and points to the relationship between wealth and access, mounting an ironic charge against Boston’s increasingly unaffordable housing. For the smaller texts, Wardwell sourced quotations from cultural figures with ties to Massachusetts, including Malcolm X, Buckminster Fuller, and Donna Summer, screen printing these striking lines (“Integrity is the essence of everything successful,” and “Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it”) onto the painting. Through this matrix of text and landscape, Wardwell embeds multiple histories and evokes the collective and polyphonic voice of an urban environment.

Rooted in fluidity and intimacy, the vivid paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles challenge and upend deeply ingrained ideas related to identity and the body in figuration. Quarles mobilizes diverse techniques such as dripping, smearing, or scraping to allow her figures to exceed their corporeal frames and evade the easy legibility sometimes expected of bodies marked by race, gender, and sexuality. Hangin’ There, Baby was included in Quarles’s standout presentation in The Milk of Dreams, the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale. The intertwining figures in Hangin’ There, Baby are staged in a cryptic environment emerging from the right side of the canvas, much of which has been left untreated on the opposite side. Throughout, the play between raw, unworked portions of canvas and tightly stylized concentrations of activity gives the painting its sense of drama. A lone, loosely rendered figure in the center of the canvas writhes in seeming ecstasy against a flat plane whose purple drop shadow recalls Quarles’s early training in graphic design. The painting’s action is sustained mostly in the cluster of unfixed, contorted figures who are gathered in a densely painted section in the upper right corner. These sensuously intertwined bodies are set within and against a backdrop that recalls the night sky, pressed against the hard edge of a triangular, painterly construction that nevertheless cannot contain them. As in much of Quarles’s work, the planes and patterns that delineate environments both situate and bisect bodies, framing them and fragmenting them simultaneously. The faces of several figures in the group are rendered in a polychromatic impasto, while others are spare and elongated, suggested mostly in sketched outlines. Pattern bursts from the canvas at different, highly controlled moments, especially in the camouflage-patterned shape that hangs like a curtain or blanket along the right side. This work captures Quarles’s painting of intimate domestic scenes in which figures cannot be fully seen or apprehended.

New York-based Aliza Nisenbaum endeavors to translate the humanity of her subjects through her colorful painted portraits of people she encounters or knows personally. An important figurative painter of her generation, Nisenbaum first gained attention in 2012 for her paintings of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America living in New York, and, in subsequent series, she depicted women who work in the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, security guards at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, subway and health-care workers, and salsa dancers. “I’m interested in the politics of visibility—who and why someone is depicted,” writes Nisenbaum. Susanna Paints is a portrait of Nisenbaum’s longtime mentor and teacher Susanna Coffey, who teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago. Building on the artist’s desire to honor her subjects through painting, this portrait pays tribute to an influential teacher and figurative painter who is depicted absorbed in the act of painting. Nisenbaum portrays the tools of painting with great attention and care, from the colorful palette with its swirl of mixing colors to the cups and brushes arrayed on the adjacent white crate. Positioned centrally in a domestic space, the subject and environment appear to take on the brilliant hues of her palette; Susanna’s face and the surrounding walls are tinged green, orange, and purple. Such exaggerations of color and form speak to Nisenbaum’s combination of observed and imagined details, consciously integrating figuration and abstraction, observation and projection, into each painting. Susanna Paints captures the humanity, expressiveness, and individuality of Nisenbaum’s approach to figurative painting, while shining a light on the important relationship between student and teacher.