A Splinter (Study for Painting)

2010 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

45 x 33 inches

Hernan Bas

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A Splinter (Study for Painting) is a large graphite work on paper by Hernan Bas that was intended as a study for a later painting. The composition features three unfinished figures, all of whom appear to be observing something unrendered or external to the picture plane. Around the group of figures roughly framed by the outline of a triangle, is a frenzy of loose marks and smudged lines that juxtapose the delicate features of the figures’ faces. Though aesthetically grounded in the iconography of the androgynous male dandy, the young protagonists of Bas’s oneiric visions are usually portrayed alone or in small groups, in attitudes of pure flânerie. Appearing as if suspended between adolescence and adulthood, Bas’s figures embody a fragile in-between state that the artist refers to as “fag limbo”. A Splinter portrays a fragment of this temporal space described by Bas, which acts as a psychic purgatory of sorts for young queer men.

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Hernan Bas creates expressionistic, yet highly detailed figurative paintings of young men. Though aesthetically grounded in the iconography of the androgynous male dandy, the young protagonists of Bas’s oneiric visions are usually portrayed alone or in small groups, in attitudes of pure flânerie. Whether confined to the intimacy of a genre scene or lost in the vertigo of a lush romantic landscape, his figures inhabit a fantasized world of implicit eroticism and ambiguous sensuality. Largely inspired by nineteenth-century decadent art and literature, Bas’s work also references the concurrent symbolist and decorative style of the French group Les Nabis. With a flamboyant palette and a refined touch, Bas revisits and reinterprets the various categories of classical painting from a homoerotic perspective that is seemingly melancholic, yet often humorous and witty.

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Colors:

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• identity.n.01
• gay.s.06
• erotic.s.01
• masculinity.n.02
• young_person.n.01
• 21st-century american painters
• gay artists