Hernan Bas

Hernan Bas, born in 1978 to a family of Cuban immigrants, spent his childhood between the city of Miami and a remote location called Ocala in northern Florida. He now lives and works in Detroit, Michigan. Through his works, he narrates a hidden world filled with desires, romance, and madness. Captivated by the French symbolist Gustave Moreau and the writings of Oscar Wilde and Huysmans, Bas often depicts funerals and cemeteries, interpreting figures of Victorian dandies with allusions to death and the fragility of life.

Hernan Bas resembles the characters in his paintings on small panels, such as The Overthinker in a Thicket from 2006. These are slender men with boyish bodies and brown hair—young, androgenous, effeminate, and neo-romantic figures that conceal the fragility of uncertain lives caught between adolescence and maturity. The figures move amidst branches in fantastical and dark settings, and the melancholy in their gazes contrasts with the vibrancy of the background colors.

Ubu Roi (The War March) from 2009 is a large canvas that stands out like a tapestry on a long wall in the Iannaccone studio’s conference room. Cinema, television, and theater are essential tools for the artist in shaping the aesthetics and conceptual vocabulary that inform his work. The costumes, drawn from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play Ubu Roi from 1896, the architecture rooted in “It’s a Small World” at Disney World in Florida, alongside watermills that might have been inspired by Thomas Kinkade’s landscapes, all contribute to creating the imaginary journey depicted in Bas’s large canvas.

Under a stormy sky, a procession of masked revelers crosses a fantastical city, standing between towers and minarets along a precarious path in a wild and threatening landscape. The crowd marches resolutely, following the ridiculous figure of King Ubu, the imaginary monarch and protagonist of the fin-de-siècle spectacle by the French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry. In his familiar hood, wearing a robe with a spiral pattern, Ubu dances forward, ready to fall into the abyss. A decadent bourgeoisie is thus blindly led by a madman toward their end. The city is depicted as lacking three-dimensionality, rendered in a geometric style, while the surrounding landscape is expressed through intense, textured brushstrokes. With this work, the artist transcends the romanticism that characterized the individual portraits of his earlier canvases, such as St. Christopher, to represent the exaggerations of contemporary society.