Biography

Hernan Bas’s expressionist and highly detailed figurative paintings are openly inspired by late-nineteenth-century decadent art and literature, as well as the concurrent symbolist and decorative style of the French group Les Nabis. While they are aesthetically grounded in the iconography of the male androgynous dandy, the young protagonists of his oneiric visions are usually portrayed alone or in small groups within descriptions of pure flânerie. Whether confined in the intimacy of a genre scene or lost in the vertigo of a dense, lush, romantic-like landscape, they inhabit a fantasized world of implicit eroticism and ambiguous sensuality. Always appearing as if suspended in time, between adolescence and adulthood, they embody the fragile in-between state that the artist refers to as “fag limbo.” With a flamboyant palette and a refined touch, Hernan Bas overall masterly revisits and reinterprets all the categories of classical painting from a seemingly melancholic yet often humorous and witty, homoerotic perspective.