Hernan Bas Biography
Hernan Bas, born in 1978 into a family of Cuban immigrants, spent his childhood between the city of Miami and a remote place called Ocala, in northern Florida. With his works he tells of a hidden world made of desires, romances and madness. Conquered by the French symbolist Gustave Moreau and by the texts of Oscar Wilde and Huysmans, Bas often paints funerals and cemeteries, interpreting figures of Victorian dandies with allusions to death and the fragility of life. Hernan Bas resembles the characters in his paintings painted on small panels as in the case of The overthinker in a Thicket from 2006, slender men, with a child's body and brown hair. Androgynous, ephebic and neo-romantic young people, who hide the fragility of uncertain lives between adolescence and maturity. The figures move caressed by branches in fantastic and dark scenarios and the melancholy of their gazes contrasts with the liveliness of the colors that form the background. Ubu Roi (The war march) from 2009 is a large canvas that stands out like a tapestry on a long wall of the conference room of the Iannaccone studio. Cinema, television and theater are essential tools for the artist in the development of aesthetics and a conceptual vocabulary that shapes the work. The costumes, taken from Alfred Jarry's representation of the absurd in “Ubu Roi” of 1896, the architecture that has its roots in “It's a Small World” built at Disney World in Florida, next to the watermills that may have been inspired by the landscapes of Thomas Kinkade are all elements that contribute to creating the imaginary journey represented on the large canvas by Hernan Bas. Under a stormy sky, a procession of masked revelers crosses a fantastic city that stands out among towers and minarets along a precarious path, in a wild and threatening landscape. The crowd marches resolutely, following the ridiculous figure of King Ubu, the fictional monarch featured in French Symbolist writer Alfred Jarry's fin-de-siècle show. In his familiar hood wearing a tunic with a spiral pattern, Ubu heads dancing and without restraint, ready to fall into the abyss. A decadent bourgeoisie is then blindly led by a madman to their demise. The city is represented as devoid of three-dimensionality according to a geometric style, while the surrounding landscape is rendered through intense material and highly expressive brushstrokes. With this work, the artist goes beyond the romanticism that characterized the individual portraits of the first canvases, such as St. Christopher, to represent the exaggerations of contemporary society.
