Second Serving: Hernan Bas
Plus Miami Art Week and Poltergeist Boy
I’m finally back after much of last year became consumed by my most creative project to date: incubating and then welcoming our baby son, Lyon. (🦁). He’s only 7 weeks old and, remarkably, is already an exacting boss with six unpaid minions: my husband and I, plus his American and British grandparents. While I buckle my seatbelt on this wild safari called motherhood, I thought I'd share some art writing from the archives (originally disseminated via my personal list-serve). I'm calling these posts Second Servings because surely great art deserves a second helping. 🍜
The post below was written in December 2023 and profiles Miami artist—Hernan Bas—whose show, The Conceptualists, I saw during Miami Art Week. Each of his brooding, occult-inspired figurative paintings are self-contained short stories. They brim with X-files level goodies: saints, seances, swamps, poltergeists, carnivorous plants. I was mesmerized by the works and so now invite you to slip into his dark and cryptic world.
Miami Art Week & Hernan Bas 12.12.23
I’m going to say it: I love Miami. The stingrays, the museums, the Cuban food, the powerboats! Our amazing friends who reside there in tax-free bliss! The Rubells! The mangroves! The vice, the ice 💎! I could keep going. Drew and I have just returned from a stimulating and sun-drenched Miami Art Week. Have we seen a lot of art? Yes! Did I say to Drew, at one point overwhelmed, “I never want to look at another piece of art again?” Yes! But we cane on.
I visited Untitled, Scope, Basel and NADA. People have asked me what I liked the most, and one answer is the work of the artist Suchitra Mattai who I had the pleasure of meeting.
Mattai is a Guyanese American artist of South Asian descent. Her punchy works examine colonialism and re-write traditional narratives by giving brown women main character energy (sometimes in a Bridgerton-esque way, sometimes not). They range from El-Anatsui scale wall hangings made from vintage saris to smaller, delicate tapestries. You can see more of her work here and read about her here.
Close seconds were Ai Wei Wei’s monumental Washington Crossing the Delaware (2023) made entirely from legos, and Andrew J. Greene’s Timeless Symbols (Negroni) (2023), an orange-garnished Negroni spinning precariously and endlessly atop a rotating metal pole.
As for the very best bits of Miami? Meze with Gil Kaplan at Doya in Wynwood, an ocean-side breakfast with
, who biked over to our hotel from her home in Coconut Grove, and ice-cold martinis + red-hot Cuban music with Rebecca Mandel of .The Conceptualists by Hernan Bas
At the urging of
, I went to see Hernan Bas’ recently opened exhibition at the Bass Museum. It ended up being the show I’ve most enjoyed this year.
Hernan Bas is a Miami artist whose Southern Gothic style is influenced by his childhood, partly spent in the woods of northern Florida. There, along with his siblings, he became engrossed in the X-files, tales of the paranormal and the occult. By age 10, he was making his first paintings with supplies bought with birthday money.
Fast forward a few decades. In his series of figurative works, The Conceptualists, each painting depicts a fictional conceptual artist who has an oddball and often morbid artistic practice. For instance, conceptual artist #1 only works with paints mixed with water from Niagara Falls.
There are ~35 paintings in the show and each vibrates with a mix of humor and unease. They are penetrating psychological studies of isolation and obsession. Each protagonist seems awash with melancholy and is surrounded by a rich assortment of objects that hint at a narrative backstory extending further than the titles of the works suggest. Bas gives us, the viewer, the opportunity for our imaginations to run wild.
He explains in interviews that he’s a self-described workaholic, painting from 10 am to 7 pm each day. Acrylic, he says, does not dry fast enough, and so he fills his remaining time with deep-dive research into his subjects, reading news articles, and watching movies and documentaries to learn more about their potential lives and predilections. His wide-ranging influences span Oscar Wilde to children’s TV shows.
From here, I’ll let you peruse my iPhone photos from the show. If you are interested in seeing The Conceptualists check it out before it closes on May 5, 2024. If you can’t make it, enjoy this teaser. Links to further exploration (and poltergeist info) below.
The final piece in the exhibition is an epic 9 x 21-foot painting of Bas in his studio. Within it, you can see at least one reference to each of the preceding conceptualist paintings (a copy of The Bell Jar, ribbons and rockets, a canvas with the outlines of milk cartons, etc.) It’s both a fun game for the viewer and a play on the use of allegory in an art historical context.
I loved this interview with Bas that takes you on a tour of his Little Havana studio. His Instagram also provides lucrative rabbit holes to burrow down. One post, of a painting showing two male figures sitting in an attic whose walls are scrawled with writing, has the caption “The curious case of the Matthew Manning poltergeist, google it.”
Drew and I did google it, taking turns to read this long-form interview with Matthew Manning Poltergeist Boy in GQ aloud to one another in the 1.5-hour Art Week traffic from Miami Beach to the airport. Let me tell you, the time flew by.