Hernan Bas

Overview

His work is recreated in the production of romantic and melancholic imagery of the classical world and refers to Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans and other writers of the aesthetic and decadent period of literature. The representation of scenes in nature with figures of contemplative and solitary young men in a universe without women are a constant in his painting. In the worlds imagined by Bas, the beautiful and the damned are not simple counterpoints, but, in fact, twins.

“I am drawn to stories and tales but I hope my interest in them translates further, as images that go beyond pure representation of things that I find cool”, explains the artist Hernan Bas. “I love the written word but I am at a constant battle trying to make images that can stand alone and compete or, better, surpass the written word. I like when the work becomes an image. That moment when everything I read and thought about to get to this finished painting just drops away, and it gets its own life, its own space for interpretation. Once I’ve let it leave the studio I don’t feel like it’s mine whatsoever anymore”.

As the CAC Málaga director Fernando Francés points out, «Bas leaves very little to chance. His compositions emerge from obsessive investigation and an idiosyncratic material observation. Over the last decade, the artist has also consistently extended his experiments to include abstraction, as amply manifested in his show at the CAC Málaga, A Brief Intermission. Although he has never completely abandoned the figurative and landscape traditions that underpin his work, Bas has developed a profoundly experimental pictorial and gestural practice, borrowing elements from Symbolist poetry. He also conveys the sense of a constant sentimental contest between the calm and the storm, and the sensation of balance about to be lost.»