“The Blue Line” (2005-06)Young Man on the Half Shell Bespeaks Nostalgic Longing
By Ken Johnson
Hernan Bas paints and draws storytelling images of winsome young men in homoerotically charged situations. At 31, Mr. Bas, who lives in Miami, is an artist of modest achievement, his career so far more promising than accomplished. So why is he the subject of a big, splashy retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum?
That the exhibition was organized by and first appeared (in 2007) at the Rubell Family Collection, a private museum in Miami where Don and Mera Rubell exhibit their holdings, raises some red flags concerning relations between public museums and private collectors.
But first, the show. Combining loose, traditional draftsmanship, expressionistic brushwork and sometimes garish color, Mr. Bas creates pictures resembling illustrations for old-time boys’ adventure novels, but with a gay twist. A mood of romantic yearning prevails.
At best he generates considerable narrative intrigue. In “The Kept Boys” (2004), two youths lie on a bed, one face down with hands tied behind his back. Across the room a slender, shirtless young man gazes out a tall window as sunlight spills in over him and sheer curtains lift in the breeze.
Often there is a gothic feeling. In a small drawing from 2001 called “The Secret of the Grave,” a boy lies on the ground before a tombstone, and a palatial mansion rises in the distance beyond an iron fence.
Mr. Bas folds in mythological motifs as well. Sometimes, as in “The Swan Prince” (2004), in which a youth in a small, shell-shaped boat is pulled by three swans tethered by red ribbons, the effect is more campy than numinous.
As a painter Mr. Bas has shown steady improvement from comparatively raw early works to pictures like the dreamy “Night Fishing” (2007), in which a boy with a fishing rod stands at water’s edge among dead trees as a smoky forest fire rages behind him. Painted with a deft touch, the picture has a fine, sensuous complexity. “The Immaculate Lactation of Saint Bernard” (2007), in which a visionary figure emerging from a hallucinatory swirl of paint shoots an arcing jet of milk from his breast at a youth on the ground, augurs richer and wilder imaginative possibilities.
The show’s biggest painting, at 5 feet 6 inches by 12 feet, is “The Great Barrier Wreath” (2006), a panoramic, verdant landscape in which numerous waifish young men are strewn. There are sad harlequins, pink flamingos and, on a rocky promontory in the distance, another thin youngster posed like an orchestra conductor against a burst of peach light. Though profusely detailed, the painting lacks the narrative focus of the smaller works, so it is not clear whether bigger will be better for Mr. Bas.
“Ocean Symphony (Dirge for the Fiji Mermaid)” (2007)New Yorkers who know Mr. Bas’s work mainly from exhibitions at the Daniel Reich Gallery in Chelsea may be surprised to learn that he also creates walk-in video installations. The most impressive here is “Ocean Symphony (Dirge for the Fiji Mermaid)” (2007), with the main attraction being a set of five wall-size video projections. Three show old black-and-white scenes of young women in mermaid costumes sinuously swimming and dancing under water. They alternate with blue-toned images of watery bubbles cascading upward.
Mr. Bas has ill-advisedly arranged a kind of sprawling funerary assemblage in front of this beguiling video imagery. He has placed all sorts of objects related to the sea and to religion on wooden pallets: seashells, feathers, bottles of holy water, a pair of lobster traps and sculptures made of copper pipe with megaphones and more shells attached. At the center, on a black velvet pillow, lies the corpse of a Fiji mermaid, a legendary creature who was supposed to have been half monkey and half fish. Though mildly evocative, the busy sculptural part of the installation makes you feel that Mr. Bas is trying too hard.
The cumulative effect of the exhibition is of a young man still finding himself as an artist. With Watteau and Blue Period Picasso looming in the art historical background, Mr. Bas conjures youthful hypersensitivity and looks for soul in a persona that mainstream culture presumably rejects and despises (the fashionableness of the waif notwithstanding). Mr. Bas’s art bears a strong family resemblance to that of the young David Hockney, Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton and Paul P., all of whom have trafficked in adolescent fantasy and erotic nostalgia. But he has yet to claim aesthetic or psychological ground that is distinctly his own. And as an installation artist, he is just getting started.
"The Merger" (2005)It is partly because of Mr. Bas’s relative immaturity that the question of the Rubells’ part in the exhibition arises. As private collectors who have purchased his work in depth over the past 10 years, they have a significant stake in the elevation of his reputation. Having the show at a major museum in New York is a good deal for them.
The museum saves on some costs, as institutions often do when they present traveling exhibitions organized by others. And the Rubells have promised to donate a piece from the exhibition to the museum, a 2004 installation called “The Aesthete’s Toy,” which revolves around a gold-painted, jewel-encrusted tortoise shell. (The museum already owns one of Mr. Bas’s paintings.)
But the museum loses some of its intellectual and ethical credibility in letting the Rubells and their former in-house curator, Mark Coetzee, completely determine an exhibition devoted to an artist whose importance remains speculative. (Charles Desmarais, the museum’s deputy director for art, brought the show to Brooklyn.) Had the Brooklyn Museum organized its own Hernan Bas exhibition or, better yet, a show examining the trend in faux-adolescent romanticism, these questions wouldn’t come into play.
No doubt this is not the last we’ll hear of these issues as museum resources diminish and private collectors offer more and more tempting, money-saving opportunities. It doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, but it will never not be tricky.
“Hernan Bas: Works From the Rubell Family Collection” continues through May 24 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
“The Burden (I Shall Leave No Memoirs)" (2006)
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