Practice in Leisure
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me
Hope - Emily Dickinson
Louis Fratino (b.1993) Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. Recent exhibitions include Night and Day, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY (solo); Heirloom, Antoine Levi Gallery, Paris (solo); Youth and Beauty!, MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, 2018 (group); and Matisse + Fratino, Cabinet Printemps, Düsseldorf, 2018 (group). He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Ridley Howard (b. 1973) figurative paintings mingle emotional longing and personal experience with a particularly timely romantic vision. While this work certainly celebrates a wide range of influences from Watteau and Balthus to French New Wave and Alex Katz , such influence is secondary—seamlessly intertwined with the image and tone of these refined and idiosyncratic pictorial narratives. There is also a kinship to the artifice and “constructedness” of much of ‘90s figuration, but rather than point to the “fakeness” of the medium, Howard offers a fundamentally sincere attempt to experience the delicately constructed and considered spaces of these paintings.
Sadie Laska (b.1974) received a BFA from West Virginia University in 1992 and an MFA from Bard College, New York, in 2014. Laska’s solo exhibitions include ‘Left Hand’, Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Paris (2012); ‘Play it as it Lays’, Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Geneva (2014); SAROJANE Kerry Schuss, New York (2014); ‘Plain Air’, Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg (2015); ‘I Clouded’, Canada, New York (2015); ‘A Foot, Some Guns, A Boot, Some Hands, Some Lips, A Breast, & A Snail’, 56 Henry, New York (2016); and ‘Rock Solid’, Office Baroque, Brussels (2016). Laska is one half of the New York band I.U.D., formed in 2004 with fellow artist Lizzi Bougatsos. They have performed at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1 MoMA, and the New Museum. She lives and works in New York.