The Firm and the Yielding: The Art and Life of Luis Frangella

Research Fellow Ruby Sutton charts the artistic development of the late Argentine artist Luis Frangella (1944–1990) as he synthesized an interest in space and perception with bold, neo-expressionist painting. Drawing on extensive research in the artist's notebooks, as well as interviews with his friends and family, Sutton provides new insight into Frangella's early life in Argentina, his move to the United States, and his role in the East Village art scene.

In a poster publicizing his 1985 show at Civilian Warfare, the artist Luis Frangella sits in his light-starved Lower East Side studio, in front of a backdrop of brick and glass windows, surrounded by heads: some are on canvas, others on cardboard, and a few are on car doors, but all depicted using thick strokes, as if he painted from the shoulder or the elbow. In the middle of the room, the artist is hunched over, wearing an acrylic knit sweater that makes him look a little straight-laced for the East Village art scene. In contrast to his neo-expressionist creations, Frangella appears cool, concentrated. He is looking up at the photographer with what appears to be mild annoyance, as if to say, Why are you still here? I’d rather be working.

The photograph was taken on Forsyth and Delancey, in an apartment Frangella shared with my godfather, Russell Sharon. I’ve always been attracted to Russell’s stories about living with Luis, in Boston and New York City, where, upon moving to the Lower East Side in the early 1980s, the two artists came to occupy four stories in a dilapidated building. Here, they enjoyed a lifestyle which seemed to erratically alternate between high-vibration anxiety and pleasant domesticity. They cooked meals for their friends—including Peter Hujar, Judy Glantzman, and David Wojnarowicz—after gallery openings, and grew eggplants on their rooftop vegetable garden. Both had studios. Luis worked constantly, and was sensitive to any form of disruption. “If anyone would try to interrupt it when he was working, which was almost all the time,” Russell remembers, “it would turn on the hysteria.”¹ In the early 1980s, Luis was producing set pieces for clubs in the East Village and gigantic paintings of torsos, developing a visual language which combined his classical sensibility with the loose, free brushstrokes of neo-expressionism, a high-pitched style which was then gaining traction in the international art world.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1944, Luis was the second eldest of four siblings raised in an upper-class Argentine family. He was the son of Roberto Frangella, a businessman from a family of Italian immigrants, and Lia Moyano, the great-granddaughter of the Spanish merchant who founded the coastal city of Mar del Plata. Luis’s mother enjoyed a bourgeois childhood: she and her four sisters learned German from their nanny, studied painting, and regularly vacationed in Europe. As a young adult, Lia organized salons, showed her paintings in galleries, and mingled with preeminent poets and writers in Buenos Aires’s cultural scene—Jorge Luis Borges allegedly called Lia and her four sisters “the famous beauties.”⁴ Thanks to his mother’s heritage, Luis would be raised with the privileges of an aristocratic upbringing, in a home stimulated by art, music, and painting. According to his siblings, their father passed on to them a desire to be industrious and hardworking.

After marrying in 1939, Luis’s parents had four children in quick succession. Concerned with how the pollution in the city would impact their youngest, Juan, who was diagnosed with asthma, they left Buenos Aires and moved to the wealthy suburb of San Isidro.⁵ There, the Frangellas grew up surrounded by nature, including sheep and cattle. Against this pastoral backdrop, Luis began expressing an interest in form and sculpture.

Luis and his older brother, Roberto, spent their days playing in nearby construction sites, building miniature houses under the fruit trees with the bricks and roof scraps they had stolen. Soon they progressed to ceramics, building religious figures with clay soil from their garden.

“Luis demonstrated, with his expressiveness, a great quality which made his work stand out with originality and personality and some special feature,” his brother Roberto remembers. “While our creations were typical of children, whether it was drawings, treehouses, or paper kites, Luis already had a different spark—that of someone superior.”⁶

When Luis was eighteen years old, the Frangella family moved back to Buenos Aires, largely to support their eldest sons who were showing promise in their studies. They purchased a large apartment in Recoleta, on the grand Avenida del Libertador, with a view of the Retiro train station. From here, Luis and Roberto could walk across the street to the University of Buenos Aires, where they were studying architecture.

Luis’s youngest sister, Lia, remembers her brother’s teenage genius with zeal. “He knew the words to every opera. He knew it in French, in German, in whatever,” she said, her eyes widening. “Luis was a monster.”⁷

When they moved back to the city, Lia remembers Luis acting differently—more reserved, more taciturn. He stayed out late, started bringing “strange” people back to their apartment, and became more distant. Russell imagines he was exploring his sexuality. In an October 1986 diary entry, Luis briefly describes this part of his biography: “1962: Moved to Buenos Aires, became both depraved and painter.”⁸ Lia would not find out Luis was gay until a few years later, when a rumor went around her husband’s school that Luis was going out with a sailor.

Luis’s parents, although raising their children in the Catholic tradition, were intellectually open-minded: they accepted Luis’s homosexuality and would later warmly host several of his lovers in Argentina. But they seemed to make sense of his sexuality by relating it to a narrative about him making it as a successful artist in New York City. Luis’s mother told him that “all great artists were gay,” a statement which holds both a tinge of acceptance and pressure. Writing about Luis after his death, his sister Lia describes that after losing his “innocence” in his teenage years, after leaving Argentina, “his life as a famous painter, a ‘Great Man’, unfolded.”⁹

One night in the early 1970s, Luis was walking out late at night—either looking to meet someone or observing the buildings. He was picked up by the police and arrested for cruising.¹⁰ In the years leading up to the Dirty War, the national military was becoming an increasingly obtrusive presence in the everyday lives of Argentineans as they gained political influence in their attempt to control the perceived threat of left-wing radicalism. Believing that Luis’s stubbornness and anti-authoritarian nature would pose a threat should he have another run-in with the military, his family started looking for ways to protect him and shuttle him out of the country.¹¹ In 1973, he received a scholarship to study visual arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).¹²

At MIT, Luis began to see space as a conceptual question, blending an architect’s interest with building immersive environments with a philosophical curiosity and an artist’s openness to illusion. Three-dimensionality became an obsession. In the 1970s he produced a series of stereograms: two-dimensional images that appear three-dimensional when viewed with the proper equipment. For a 1975 show at MIT, Luis designed an installation called Visual Gravity, covering three areas surrounding the Center for Advanced Visual Studies in a patterned linoleum, so that, when wearing Luis’s glasses, cones would seem to grow out of the floor and surround the viewer.¹³ Another piece, Cuchillos, viewed through bifocal lenses, creates the impression of knives protruding out of the canvas. In order to achieve their full effect, these pieces demanded the viewer’s participation.

“I only suggest some parts of the structure, and the rest has to be done by the imagination of the viewer. The idea of a totality comes later,” Luis wrote on an undated piece of grid paper. “I create the set of references and the viewer imagines the space.”¹⁴

Russell remembers Luis being stoic at MIT, often opting to sleep on the floor of his studio, finding a sense of comfort, and control, in denying himself certain luxuries and keeping things as simple as possible. “He liked to have parameters for himself, discipline,” Russell describes. “It was a spiritual exercise that ran pervasively through his life.”

Luis rarely returned to the apartment he shared with his friend, the avant-garde composer Maryanne Amacher, although the two artists inspired one another creatively. At MIT, Amacher was experimenting with “site-specific music,” collecting raw sounds from different locations over months or years to understand the environment, mixing the sounds from different places, and transmitting them over telephone lines. In a similar vein to how Luis’s stereograms were manipulating distance, Amacher’s compositions explored the idea of synchronicity: “hearing spaces distant from each other at the same time, which we do not experience in our lives.”¹⁵ When Luis was seeking a green card after leaving MIT, he and Amacher got married at City Hall in New York City. Russell remembers that when a guest at their tea-time wedding ceremony suggested that theirs was a strange partnership, Luis threw a cup of tea on him and everyone “pretended nothing happened.”

While architecture seems like the perfect calling for an aesthete with controlling tendencies, Luis’s work at MIT shows he was searching for something different. His work reveals an epistemic undercurrent: he not only studied space and distance as externalized subjects, but also played with the distance between the metaphysical topics that interested him and his ability to single-handedly grasp their underlying concepts. Reflecting on Luis’s later work, Judy Glantzman describes the artistic motivation to play with the distance between artist and subject: “That wire figure will never be a real figure,” she said. “So your artwork is not just about trying to succeed in capturing it, but also an acknowledgement that you never can.”²¹ In an attempt to achieve balance, Luis turned to mysticism and artist-viewer collaboration. ²²

Underlying the philosophy of the I-Ching are the concepts of yin and yang, the feminine and the masculine, the yielding and the firm. Revisiting Luis’s work now, I see this in all of it. His work is at once concerned with control and curious about the loss of it: his architectural manipulation of surfaces is self-consciously undermined by the expressionist strokes he uses. While living in Buenos Aires in the spring of 2023, I went to see Luis’s work on display at the Centro Cultural Kirchner; looking at his paintings, my friend noted that while his female torsos struck him as cold, the male torsos seemed more alive and sensual. But Luis, perhaps seeking balance, continued to paint the female body throughout his life.

Luis himself seemed to be pained when his controlling tendencies and desire to experience life fluidly came into conflict. Time, in particular, troubled him—he was always afraid of running out of it. In a 1986 diary entry, Luis reflected on his “childhood obsession with time,” writing: “I should’ve known then it was not the hours that counted, but the minutes. The Now minutes.”²³ Driving with Wojnarowicz up to Richmond, Virginia, where curator Carlo McCormick had invited a group of East Village artists to create an installation, Luis notes in his diary that he has left his watch behind: “I don’t want to know the time it would make me nervous. I’ll take it as it comes with many people with different feelings.”²⁴The diary entries are surrounded by references to an “H” infection; he notes that thoughts about his health are increasingly consuming him.

Despite his serious nature, Luis quickly adapted to life in Lower Manhattan and its atmosphere of playful degeneracy. In the early 1980s, Luis became a key figure in the emerging East Village art scene, impressing younger artists like Wojnarowicz and Glantzman with his classical arts training and romantic sensibility. When Mike Bidlo and Wojnarowicz took over Pier 34—transforming the abandoned warehouse turned cruising destination into a guerilla art project—Luis was invited to contribute. There he became known for his technical dexterity, maneuvering large brushes with sticks to produce larger-than-life murals of male and female torsos.²⁵

The photographer Andreas Sterzing captured Luis at the pier, standing behind one of his murals, on top of a mess of debris which appears to be broken down shipping containers. Built in 1932 when New York was a busy port city, the pier first represented the opulence of the city, echoing the industrial age’s promise of prosperity and massive employment. After the financial crash of the 1970s, the piers were abandoned by the city and repurposed by gay men seeking a place for anonymous encounters in the spirit of post-Stonewall liberation. In one of his murals, Luis rendered his characteristic torsos in thick orange and blue strokes that make their muscles appear to vibrate. His subjects feel both like remnants of the past and affirmations of humanity’s persistence, elevating the human form into a state of celestial timelessness. Another photo by Sterzing shows Bidlo and Wojnarowicz lying on a patch of grass planted by the latter as one of his artistic contributions. Wojnarowicz looks up at the sky, Bidlo looks down at him. Luis’s head towers over them, looking blissfully indifferent to their presence.

When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of it forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending.

— David Wojnarowicz²⁶

In 1984, Luis returned to Argentina for the first time since his 1971 departure to Boston, bringing Wojnarowicz with him. After the 1983 fall of the military dictatorship, an underground art scene was emerging in Buenos Aires, and the curator Jorge Glusberg, who first showed Luis’s work in 1979, had invited the artist to help organize an exhibition. Luis and Wojnarowicz transported their peers’ paintings from New York to Argentina in their suitcases. The result was Desde New York: 27 artists from the East Village. Two gallery assistants almost quit their jobs when Wojnarowicz and Luis started painting graffiti directly on the gallery walls at CayC, The Centro de Arte y Comunicación.“³⁰

At this point Luis had established himself in New York City: in 1983, he had his first solo show at Hal Bromm Gallery, and, later that year, was featured in the East Village Eye’s profile of “Twenty Artists” (the subtitle reads: “LOWER EAST SIDE ARTISTS NOW HOT COMMODITY”).³¹

It was during this moment, following the fall of Argentina’s repressive military regime, that Luis finally began to receive recognition in his country of origin. He took the opportunity to be provocative. Invited by a national television program to speak about his art, Luis presented a sculpture of a man’s face, his eyes bleeding red, placed inside a fruit crate so it looked like a prisoner. The announcer asked him what the piece was called. Wojnarowicz describes: “The camera did a close-up on the agonized cardboard face as Luis sweetly answreed [sic]—this is national t.v.—I call him: ‘repressed homosexual.’ Suddenly the camera twisted to a commercial.”³²

Has the H. come back? I have some little wounds. Can it be it again? I hope not. Everything increases my nervous state, the tremendous gases that I have suffered and the blood that came out of me. Everything has weakened me. Now this eruption on my chest perhaps results from the vitamins and dissolvable types, but in any case, my body needs a good rest, which I will take in Argentina. I hope. The painting is finished, thank goodness. And thank God. A past chapter, now. —Luis Frangella, September 22, 1985³⁴

Despite embracing the darker sides of life in his creative practice, Luis lived in denial of the AIDS epidemic. Even as HIV spread through the downtown art community and close friends contracted the illness, Luis never spoke about it in public. When Russell went to get tested, he remembers Luis becoming hysterical. “He thought it was bad luck,” Russell remembers. “To acknowledge that you had a pimple, or a disease, was to open the door for it to come in.”

But Luis’s diary entries from as early as 1985 show he was consumed by the threat of disease, referencing “H.”—perhaps a reference to HIV, although his sister Lia told me she interpreted this as references to herpes. He documented his sugar intake and macrobiotic diet. As early as March 1986, Luis reflected that he would like to move to Buenos Aires, deciding that he does not have much longer to live. He writes: “I want to close myself off to the charms of the world, since I can’t manage to dedicate myself to the small, the intimate, the things that fascinate the spirit.”³⁵

Luis was hospitalized for a seizure in 1988, shortly after returning to New York from Madrid, where he had met Queen Sofia of Spain at a show featuring his work. He then lost his ability to speak Spanish, and soon all control of his muscles. In their studio on Forsyth, Russell hired a pair of nurses to look after Luis around the clock, and propped him up in front of an easel so that he could continue to work.³⁶

At the end of his life, Luis’s work simplified and he began to paint still lifes. In these, he returned to the subject that bothered him as a child, as if humbling himself before the passing of time. He produced a series of candle paintings, rendered in muted pastels. He continued work on a series of star paintings which he had begun while visiting his family in Argentina. Made by studying the sky from the same vantage point at different points in the night, he refers to the series as a “study of the hours.” He returned to a childhood book of constellations. Bedridden, he continued the series, consulting the I Ching to decide the size of his canvases and using the book to copy the constellations.

“Everything else is lost in the world. You can start learning everything again by reading the stars,” Luis told David Hirsh in an April 1990 interview at his Forsyth apartment, nine months before his death on December 7th.³⁷

About the author

Ruby Sutton is a writer from Minnesota. Her work appears in Compact, Astra, Believer and The Mars Review of Books.

Writing from the 2023 Research Fellowship is edited by Sophia Larigakis.