Lot Essay
"Lately, I’ve been thinking of dandies as creatures, to some extent, like exotic birds".
Hernan Bas
Painted in 2004, contemporaneous to the artist’s inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, trying to fit in is a masterful example of Hernan Bas’ painterly vision of a queer sublime. Rendered in evocative brushstrokes, the painting depicts a flock of vivid flamingos and a single, elegant boy who apes their pose. All appear relaxed despite a darkening sky whose blue-slate tones are mirrored in the water beneath. Drawing on photographic fashion campaigns by the likes of Bruce Weber as well as the Floridian landscape of his youth—what the artist has called “the southern gothic mood of northern Florida”—Bas’s paintings of this period are at once serene yet charged; they seem to exist on a precipice of sorts (H. Bas, quoted in K. Tylevich, “Hernan Bas: The Story at the Intermission,” Elephant Magazine, Spring 2014, online). In trying to fit in, his languid, handsome protagonist occupies an evanescent world outside reality, where man and nature commune in tranquility even as storms crackle overhead.
Born in Miami where he still lives, Bas has long been influenced by the excess and nihilism of the late eighteenth century’s Romantic period. In pellucid washes, he paints candy-colored pinks, tropical greens, aching blues, and formally, his canvases call to mind those of Elizabeth Peyton. Like Peyton, his figures, too, are willowy, waif-like, and introspective. Whereas Peyton’s visual iconography is tied to an urban milieu, Bas, however, locates his men within a sublime nature. Against lush swamps and verdant woodlands, they lounge and preen in environments “suffused by a kind of magical queerness” (D. Jones, “Hernan Bas”, Artforum, vol. 58, no. 7, March 2020, online). Indeed, in this sense, Bas’s work can be seen in dialogue with that of his contemporary Salman Toor, whose cast of mostly queer men live, dance, and cavort in worlds of their own making. Bas and Toor alike understand that to create new existences, one must first give image to such visions.
To create his paintings, Bas pulls from a variety of reference points, from nineteenth-century caricatures and classic films to Andy Warhol, Andy Goldsworthy, and the artist’s own memories. In his earliest days, he looked to the decorative paintings of the French Impressionists, particularly those of Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose flat, rich colors echo those in the present work. Such a blend of inspiration necessarily contributes to the atemporal feelings that infuse so many of his canvases, a sensation that Bas actively advances. “I want the characters to have their own space, without any built-in narrative or nostalgia surrounding them,” he has explained. “‘…the same issue that lingers over the face of a young man from the nineteenth century still plays out the same way on his great-grandson's face today” (H. Bas, quoted in op. cit., Spring 2014, online).
Hernan Bas
Painted in 2004, contemporaneous to the artist’s inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, trying to fit in is a masterful example of Hernan Bas’ painterly vision of a queer sublime. Rendered in evocative brushstrokes, the painting depicts a flock of vivid flamingos and a single, elegant boy who apes their pose. All appear relaxed despite a darkening sky whose blue-slate tones are mirrored in the water beneath. Drawing on photographic fashion campaigns by the likes of Bruce Weber as well as the Floridian landscape of his youth—what the artist has called “the southern gothic mood of northern Florida”—Bas’s paintings of this period are at once serene yet charged; they seem to exist on a precipice of sorts (H. Bas, quoted in K. Tylevich, “Hernan Bas: The Story at the Intermission,” Elephant Magazine, Spring 2014, online). In trying to fit in, his languid, handsome protagonist occupies an evanescent world outside reality, where man and nature commune in tranquility even as storms crackle overhead.
Born in Miami where he still lives, Bas has long been influenced by the excess and nihilism of the late eighteenth century’s Romantic period. In pellucid washes, he paints candy-colored pinks, tropical greens, aching blues, and formally, his canvases call to mind those of Elizabeth Peyton. Like Peyton, his figures, too, are willowy, waif-like, and introspective. Whereas Peyton’s visual iconography is tied to an urban milieu, Bas, however, locates his men within a sublime nature. Against lush swamps and verdant woodlands, they lounge and preen in environments “suffused by a kind of magical queerness” (D. Jones, “Hernan Bas”, Artforum, vol. 58, no. 7, March 2020, online). Indeed, in this sense, Bas’s work can be seen in dialogue with that of his contemporary Salman Toor, whose cast of mostly queer men live, dance, and cavort in worlds of their own making. Bas and Toor alike understand that to create new existences, one must first give image to such visions.
To create his paintings, Bas pulls from a variety of reference points, from nineteenth-century caricatures and classic films to Andy Warhol, Andy Goldsworthy, and the artist’s own memories. In his earliest days, he looked to the decorative paintings of the French Impressionists, particularly those of Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose flat, rich colors echo those in the present work. Such a blend of inspiration necessarily contributes to the atemporal feelings that infuse so many of his canvases, a sensation that Bas actively advances. “I want the characters to have their own space, without any built-in narrative or nostalgia surrounding them,” he has explained. “‘…the same issue that lingers over the face of a young man from the nineteenth century still plays out the same way on his great-grandson's face today” (H. Bas, quoted in op. cit., Spring 2014, online).