11/22/2023 0 Comments Brief intermission curtainTwo pictorial elements, which at first glance may pass unnoticed, subvert the image entirely: a thoughtful-looking boy on one side and, opposite him, another boy leaning against a balustrade, each trying to communicate with the other. Rapid brush strokes, colours and superimposed forms dominate this diptych. This is the case of His voice would be the loudest in the land (2009), a painting in which the abstraction of the landscape evolves through the composition of colour. There is no clear tendency towards one form of representation or the other, but rather an interaction that sometimes inclines more in the direction of figuration and sometimes more in the direction of abstraction. Hernan Bas’s works are created in a tense field that straddles abstraction and figuration. The trees and marshy skies are represented with Bas’s characteristic palette, with rapid brush strokes in rich purple and pink tones. The figure is seated, unperturbed and engrossed in his activity, seemingly oblivious to the sinister, threatening outside world around him. A small-format piece, it shows a (somewhat languid) teenager who is really the devil’s evil spirit. Mephistopheles, at 17 (reading poetry) (2007) is the oldest work in the exhibition. The aura of romanticism, decadence and occasional dark existentialism that surrounds the delicate figures in his paintings recalls the sinister world of Edgar Allan Poe, the dandyism of Oscar Wilde, the explorations of Jean-Yves Rimbaud and the aesthetics of Joris-Karl Huysmans. One of the main influences in Hernan Bas’s world is his fondness for literature and poetry. Two of the works have been made specifically for the occasion and are therefore receiving their first public showing here. Entitled Hernan Bas: A Brief Intermission, it features around thirty-six recent works, dating from 2007 to the present day. This show at the CAC Málaga is Hernan Bas’s first major exhibition in Spain. In his works, those mysterious, phantasmagorical, esoteric landscapes are conveyed through emphatic strokes, with a clearly discernible horror vacui. He was particularly interested in the books in the “Occult” section of the local library, and his early drawings simulated the illustrations in those books, or in certain cases represented his own ideas. Hernan Bas (Miami, 1978) is descended from a family of Cuban immigrants and divided his childhood between the city of Miami and Ocala, in North Florida, where he spent his free time getting lost in the forest with his siblings and having little adventures. 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.” 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. 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. His compositions emerge from obsessive investigation and an idiosyncratic material observation. Once I’ve let it leave the studio I don’t feel like it’s mine whatsoever anymore”.Īs the CAC Málaga director Fernando Francés points out, “Bas leaves very little to chance. 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. “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 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. In the worlds imagined by Bas, good and evil are not simply counterpoints: they are identical. Nature scenes with contemplative and solitary young males in a universe without women are a recurring motif in his painting. His work revolves around the romantic and melancholic images of the classical world, with references to Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans and other writers of the Aesthetic and Decadent literary movements. The artist’s first show at a museum in Spain, it features thirty-six paintings, some of them created specifically for the occasion. The Centro de Arte Contemporáneo of Málaga proudly presents A Brief Intermission by the American artist Hernan Bas, opening 21 September. THE CAC MÁLAGA PRESENTS HERNAN BAS: A BRIEF INTERMISSION
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