Art critic Roberta Smith writes of Fratino's paintings, "Seemingly painted mostly in the same interior, they are also hot with the pleasure of lying-around-the-house domesticity, of shared privacy. And they are hot too with painterly attention and erudition — inviting a similar scrutiny from the viewer. Nearly every brush stroke and mark, every detail of furnishings and body hair, has a life of its own."[5] Similarly, Antwaun Sargent writes in The New York Times, "Fratino and these other contemporary gay figure artists share a philosophy, despite their different aesthetics: They’re all committed to reflecting the mostly unseen interior lives of the men they admire, and to celebrating a diverse set of subjects who, taken together, stand in opposition to a canonical history of art that has long ignored an openly gay view of the male body."[6] Elsewhere, the writer Durga Chew-Bose notes, "Fratino’s moony eye for the erotic is trained on details that rouse otherwise mundane prospects... which features two eggs on toast as well as other quotidian clues lyrically scattered on a round tabletop, discombobulates scale in its ode to the Cubist tableau-objet."[7]