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Lot Essay
‘I have reached these lands but newly / From an ultimate dim Thule— / From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE—Out of TIME’ (Edgar Allan Poe)
In Two cowards at the monument to courage (2010), Hernan Bas conjures a dreamlike otherworld in which opulent architectural forms are subsumed by vibrant nature. From the upper left corner of the composition, the titular ‘courage’ surveys the scene in the form of a regal stone lion. Beneath him, two ‘cowards’ linger mournfully amid the fantastic, abundant tableau. One of these willowy youths rests upon a cool stone staircase, which ascends beyond the picture plane. The second heartsick figure descends beneath him, grasping at his chest with both hands. Around the painting’s protagonists, winding tree trunks knot themselves into gnarled archways and verdant, overgrown foliage blooms in brilliant emerald and viridian. Glistening turquoise water streams, pools and cascades. Bas uses airbrush, acrylic, block printing, metallic paint and household gloss to build a panoply of tones and textures. Part of a wider body of work steeped in the imagery of Dark Romanticism, Two cowards at the monument to courage was included in Bas’s important mid-career survey and first solo institutional show in Europe at the Kunstverein Hannover in 2012.
Bas’s oeuvre is suffused with references to literature, and the present painting forms part of a series of works exhibited collectively in 2010 under the title The Hallucinations of Poets. These sublime, escapist canvases explored the preoccupations of Dark Romanticism, and the series was the first by the artist to directly engage with poetry. In these works Bas channels Poe, Melville, Hawthorn and Dickinson, envisioning nature as a shadowy spiritual force steeped in mystery and foreboding. Echoing Poe’s haunting poem ‘Dream-Land’ (1844), the present work brims with ‘Bottomless vales and boundless floods, / And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods’. Across the canvas, sprawling life mutates and hypertrophies in uncanny excess. Bas loved ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books as a child, and with works such as the present he offers myriad and overlapping routes through the painting, inviting the viewer to continue its narrative in their mind.
Bas was born in Miami and raised in Ocala, northern Florida, on an isolated farm surrounded by vast forest. The Hallucinations of Poets was his first body of work executed wholly in Detroit, where he moved in 2010. There is a sense in Two cowards at the monument to courage that Bas is mining his childhood memories of the landscape he left behind. ‘I think that overwhelming fear and fascination with the unknown, with what the forests “held”, is embedded in a lot of my work’ he explains (H. Bas in conversation with K. Tylevich, ‘Hernan Bas: The Story at the Intermission’, Elephant Magazine, Spring 2014). As in the gothic imagery of Henry Fuseli, the present work’s ensemble of extraordinary images is rendered coherent and plausible, recalling the intensity of childhood dreams or fairy-tales. The work’s richly layered and decadent surface suggests a world continually engaged in a project of remaking. Steeped in equal parts intrigue and disquiet, Two cowards at the monument to courage appears adrift in time and place, a liminal realm rich in latent meaning.
In Two cowards at the monument to courage (2010), Hernan Bas conjures a dreamlike otherworld in which opulent architectural forms are subsumed by vibrant nature. From the upper left corner of the composition, the titular ‘courage’ surveys the scene in the form of a regal stone lion. Beneath him, two ‘cowards’ linger mournfully amid the fantastic, abundant tableau. One of these willowy youths rests upon a cool stone staircase, which ascends beyond the picture plane. The second heartsick figure descends beneath him, grasping at his chest with both hands. Around the painting’s protagonists, winding tree trunks knot themselves into gnarled archways and verdant, overgrown foliage blooms in brilliant emerald and viridian. Glistening turquoise water streams, pools and cascades. Bas uses airbrush, acrylic, block printing, metallic paint and household gloss to build a panoply of tones and textures. Part of a wider body of work steeped in the imagery of Dark Romanticism, Two cowards at the monument to courage was included in Bas’s important mid-career survey and first solo institutional show in Europe at the Kunstverein Hannover in 2012.
Bas’s oeuvre is suffused with references to literature, and the present painting forms part of a series of works exhibited collectively in 2010 under the title The Hallucinations of Poets. These sublime, escapist canvases explored the preoccupations of Dark Romanticism, and the series was the first by the artist to directly engage with poetry. In these works Bas channels Poe, Melville, Hawthorn and Dickinson, envisioning nature as a shadowy spiritual force steeped in mystery and foreboding. Echoing Poe’s haunting poem ‘Dream-Land’ (1844), the present work brims with ‘Bottomless vales and boundless floods, / And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods’. Across the canvas, sprawling life mutates and hypertrophies in uncanny excess. Bas loved ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books as a child, and with works such as the present he offers myriad and overlapping routes through the painting, inviting the viewer to continue its narrative in their mind.
Bas was born in Miami and raised in Ocala, northern Florida, on an isolated farm surrounded by vast forest. The Hallucinations of Poets was his first body of work executed wholly in Detroit, where he moved in 2010. There is a sense in Two cowards at the monument to courage that Bas is mining his childhood memories of the landscape he left behind. ‘I think that overwhelming fear and fascination with the unknown, with what the forests “held”, is embedded in a lot of my work’ he explains (H. Bas in conversation with K. Tylevich, ‘Hernan Bas: The Story at the Intermission’, Elephant Magazine, Spring 2014). As in the gothic imagery of Henry Fuseli, the present work’s ensemble of extraordinary images is rendered coherent and plausible, recalling the intensity of childhood dreams or fairy-tales. The work’s richly layered and decadent surface suggests a world continually engaged in a project of remaking. Steeped in equal parts intrigue and disquiet, Two cowards at the monument to courage appears adrift in time and place, a liminal realm rich in latent meaning.