The figures in Hernan Bas's paintings are charged with potential. Captured at various thresholds - between youth and adulthood, innocence and experience, public and private realms - and situated within a shifting terrain of interior and exterior spaces that bring to mind poles of intellect and physicality, the androgynous boys in these paintings engage in rituals of courtship, love and death that seem to be based on a theatrical exaggeration of emotion. The construction of identity and dispersal of meaning are rendered thematically and pictorially fraught. Bas embellishes and destabilises as he describes, his brushwork often threatening to engulf, his colours edging towards over-ripe or chemical hues suggestive of transformation or intoxication.
Clearly there are literary precursors at play - in particular the Decadent writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde are evoked. There's also a keen sense both of the pleasures and the limits of a queer vocabulary which, often thought of as demarcating a space of resistance through the awareness of double meanings and the construction of codes, is unlocked by Bas to welcome major motifs from the art historical canon. Reclaiming some of art's grand themes and spotlighting the degree of role-play that necessarily accompanies any new interpretation, Bas invites us to revel in a liberating sense of flux that, as much as it applies to the nascent identity of the youths he paints, alludes to the creative act itself.
Hernan Bas, born in 1978, lives and works in Miami. He has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2009), Rubell Family Collection (2007), The Moore Space, Miami (2004) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2002). Bas' work has also been exhibited in The Collectors, curated by Elmgreen & Dragset, Nordic and Danish Pavilions, Venice Biennale (2009), Busan Biennale, Korea (2008), Aspen Art Museum (2007), Schirn Kunsthalle (2005) and Whitney Biennial (2004).
Clearly there are literary precursors at play - in particular the Decadent writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde are evoked. There's also a keen sense both of the pleasures and the limits of a queer vocabulary which, often thought of as demarcating a space of resistance through the awareness of double meanings and the construction of codes, is unlocked by Bas to welcome major motifs from the art historical canon. Reclaiming some of art's grand themes and spotlighting the degree of role-play that necessarily accompanies any new interpretation, Bas invites us to revel in a liberating sense of flux that, as much as it applies to the nascent identity of the youths he paints, alludes to the creative act itself.
Hernan Bas, born in 1978, lives and works in Miami. He has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2009), Rubell Family Collection (2007), The Moore Space, Miami (2004) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2002). Bas' work has also been exhibited in The Collectors, curated by Elmgreen & Dragset, Nordic and Danish Pavilions, Venice Biennale (2009), Busan Biennale, Korea (2008), Aspen Art Museum (2007), Schirn Kunsthalle (2005) and Whitney Biennial (2004).
Exhibitions
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Saints & Secret Sects
2 June - 28 July 2007 -
In the Low Light
23 March - 23 April 2005
