Artist: Hernan Bas

Eight years after his last exhibition in Japan, Perrotin presents a new solo exhibition by Hernan Bas in Tokyo. Through his evocative paintings, Bas continues to explore themes of desire, fantasy, literature, and queer identity, creating richly atmospheric worlds suspended between reality and imagination.

The following is an essay authored by curator Yuko Hasegawa on the occasion of this exhibition.

The Tension of Limbo - Shedding Light on the Forgotten

Hernan Bas’s canvases hit the viewer with an unsettling impact: at once deeply ornate and charged with a sense of disquiet. They exist in a constant dialogue between beauty and absurdity, melancholy and humor, decadent aestheticism and critique. Framed with photographic immediacy, his scenes leave no space untouched—brimming with intricate detail, vibrant color, and an exclusive cast of young male figures.

Caught between youth and adulthood, these figures inhabit the fragile, liminal space that Bas calls "fag limbo", where time seems to freeze. This state of suspension is the very source of the underlying tension in Bas's paintings. They exist as romantic dreamers—forever paused on the brink of becoming—while simultaneously operating as active participants in capitalist display and self-presentation. It is precisely within this ambiguity that a contemporary critique emerges. In The Visitors—a series exhibited this year at the Ca' Pesaro Museum in Venice featuring figures wandering aimlessly through tourist destinations—Bas conjures a portrait of modern flâneurs drifting through a globalized world. Hovering within their environments, the figures are framed by a rich collection of attributes—jewelry, tattoos, slogans—revealing their stories in conversation with their backdrops. Drawing on mythology, literature, history, subculture, and mass media, Bas invokes the idiosyncrasies of cultural identity through charged, symbolic references, inviting the viewer into the thrill of a chimerical reading.

Words and stories are important to Bas. He first creates a list of titles, which he then transforms into visual ideas and translates into paintings through his distinctive pictorial practice.This method represents a paradoxical creative process in which the painting first exists as text before being visualized. When speaking about his work, Bas describes a dual fascination: a deep engagement with the written word, alongside a desire to elevate it into images that ultimately transcend language to become self-sustaining. His lineage traces back to late-19th century Decadent literature—the dark aestheticism of Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Charles Baudelaire. In many ways, his practice re-enacts 19th-century Aestheticism through the lens of a 21st-century queer sensibility.

Bas has once said, "What I try to do is create images which can be autonomous. I love that moment when everything I have read and thought to get to this painting disappears and it takes on a life of its own, finds its own space for interpretation". Infusing the traditions of figurative and landscape painting with motifs borrowed from Symbolist poetry, he has developed an experimental painterly gesture.

Consider, for example, the series wittily titled The First and the Last. These works bring together a diverse array of concepts—from the winners or first instances of specific events to the final iterations of others. In the monumental canvas The last museum guard at the last museum on Earth, a dapper, suited guard wearing a badge stands before Picasso’s Guernica. Framed above and below by the lush green of house plants that hint at an outdoor realm, the youth stands before this somber masterpiece; his eyes, a blend of perplexity and melancholy, gleam with a heightened blue. At his feet sits a 'No Photography' sign. The allure and enigma of the title invite endless speculation: Is violence imminent? Is this truly the final painting left on Earth? At the exact moment where the image transcends words to claim its own distinct space, Bas’s signature ambiguity achieves its maximum resonance.

The psychopolitical dynamics of Bas's art are fully realized in The Conceptualists. Set within the realm of Conceptual Art—which, at its northernmost extreme, permits 'anything' to be art—the work extends a playful absolution to peculiar, queer acts. The young man applying gold leaf to withered plants finds his action endowed with form and meaning through a blend of precision, sensuality, and wild abandon.

Bas was born in Miami in the late 1970s into a family of Cuban immigrants. Having fled Cuba following the rise of the Castro regime, his parents, including his musician father, relocated the family of six children deep into the woods of North Florida. Bas spent his first six years wandering and embarking on small adventures with his siblings in this remote, time-isolated forest. 'It was a very strange place,' Bas recalls. Conversations about Bigfoot sightings, UFOs, and ghosts were entirely commonplace. This environment laid a firm foundation for the Gothic sensibility and unbridled imagination that thread through his mature work. The affection for the esoteric and the naive faith in the unseen nurtured during his childhood serve as the prototype for the enigmatic, fantastical landscapes inhabiting Bas's adult painting.

In his latest body of work, TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen), Bas shifts this sense of limbo away from mythic landscapes and tourist hubs, relocating it to the mundane yet strangely theatrical spaces of suburban commerce—yard sales, florist stalls, and seaside souvenir stands. The title itself draws on an idiom for that fleeting moment when something obscured is briefly thrust into the light. In the monumental 5.5-metre- wide canvas All you ever wanted to know about 5B, secondhand clothes and knick-knacks are staged across a front lawn like theatrical props, creating a quiet tension where the figure standing before them feels like an exhibit themselves. He is depicted not as an artist displaying their work, but as an individual attaching a price tag to their own possessions— even including his youth and time itself— exposing them to the gaze of passersby.

In The prodigal son (farmers market, 3:30 pm), a young man selling wilted flowers beneath a "Happy Mother's Day" banner, a figure on the beach selling shells with a handwritten price list— what is depicted here is both the merchandise itself and the youth and labor of the person offering it. A discount sign taped by drooping flowers signals a subtle transposition: the traditional vanitas motif—an allegory of transience and vanity—is transposed onto the portrait of a living subject. The painting depicting a young man in uniform standing before an empty stadium belongs to this same continuum. It is unclear whether he ever reached his moment to shine, instead suspended in a moment that belongs neither to winner nor loser.

His meticulous renderings of price tags, wilted petals, and sun-baked shells emanate a staged quietude, functioning as contemporary vanitas. Bas’s ongoing struggle to transcend the written word and arrive at a singular, “autonomous” image remains directly tethered to his primal gesture as a ten-year-old boy: hand-painting stories borrowed from the library's occult shelf.

TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen) superimposes capitalist display with personal self-presentation, blurring the boundary between seller and sold. Through mundane, commonplace scenes, the series quietly yet incisively confronts universal themes of value, time, and aging.

Yuko Hasegawa