ART CITIES:Savanah-Hernan Bas
Hernan Bas is often compared to American painters like Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik. Yet while this older generation has depicted pop culture’s beautiful people, Bas’s first love is literature. Describing his works as partly an attempt to distil the feeling generated by a book into one image, each series of paintings is inspired by a different set of authors including Rimbaud, Huysmans, Wilde, Dickinson and Melville.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: SCAD Museum of Art
Hernan Bas in his solo exhibition “Florida Living” at SCAD Museum of Art in Savanah shows his recent body of work that pays homage to his home, the state of Florida and includes paintings, screens and sculptures that explore allegory, narrative painting and his personal biography. Inspired by images of Monet’s painting studio, Bas conceptually approaches the museum’s gallery as a decadent boudoir filled with freestanding folding screens, typically used as room dividers. He responds to the manner in which the paintings were positioned, overlapping each other, and creating new compositions by transforming two-dimensional painted canvas into accidental sculptural elements. Bas’ folding screens are painted with scenes of beautiful young men subsumed in lush, tropical environments. These sensual and aloof male subjects are at odds with their surroundings and simultaneously integral to them. This tension is furthered through the use of repetitive and abundant forms and formal elements. The artist employs camp aesthetics, such as bright colors and decorative subjects, as a critical device to explore the manner in which meaning is codified. This artistic approach is slyly analogous to the ways in which homoerotic content was historically engaged as subtext in literature, particularly in the work of Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans. It is Huyseman’s dandy protagonist in “Against Nature” that led Bas to imagine a similar character occupying his fantastical room, except one that resides in Florida, surrounded by local vernacular symbols of luxury and abundance, typically a bit campy, such as underwater scenes that are common as murals in seafood restaurants. In addition, large pink birds are central motifs in Florida Living. They appear as a flock of spoonbills in pithily titled works such as “The Dawn of Modernity” and flamingos in “Pink Plastic Lures” and “Pink Prose”. The artist’s introduction of new sculptural elements in the form of constructed flamingos, extends his interest in creating an absurd, tragicomic and heightened environment. The exhibition is part of deFINE ART 2017, held Feb. 21–24 at SCAD locations in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, and Hong Kong. DeFINE ART is an annual program of exhibitions, lectures, performances and public events that highlights emerging and established artists and visionaries.
Info: Curator: Janse van Rensburg, SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia, Duration: 14/2-20/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.scadmoa.org
