Hernan Bas Creates His Own Art Basel in "The Conceptualists"

Hernan Bas' studio in Little Havana is as stimulating and visually rich with details as one of his paintings. Space-age furniture pieces made of sleek, rounded plastic recur through the space. There are shelves full of art books, ceramics, taxidermies of local birds and fauna, and other knickknacks and souvenirs. There's even an oddly specific collection of dollhouse-size replicas of the Amityville Horror house. "I just thought it was interesting that people were making models of them," he says of the models.

But the most important model may be the one on a table in the center of the back room, a planning diorama for "The Conceptualists," Bas' upcoming show at the Bass in Miami Beach. Its stark, white color and boxy form evoke another horror entirely, that of Art Basel Miami Beach.

"I was very picky about it since it's opening during the fair; everyone's in that mindset, and most people come to Miami just for the fair," Bas says. "I wanted to mimic the layout of an art fair like you're standing and looking down the rows of booths."

Fairs like Art Basel can bring out the worst the art world has to offer, shoving all manner of human creativity into a massive marketplace where art matters less than how much a deep-pocketed collector pays for it. With "The Conceptualists," Bas has constructed his own much more entertaining art fair. Each of the 35 paintings, displayed on printouts taped to a wall when I visited the studio, features an artist with a different type of absurd conceptual art practice.

"They all have their own little things going on, and most of them are, to me, intentionally funny or have some kind of dark humor. Like this guy is a sand sculptor," Bas explains, gesturing to a lad with white pants and a Breton stripe shirt, "but he specifically carves beached whales and dolphins."

Every piece in "The Conceptualists" engages in the melodramatic yet ridiculously unserious artistic discipline that one usually sees in parodies of the art world like The Square or Velvet Buzzsaw. They all look somewhat alike, all possessing the same slim, androgynous build and gaunt complexion that has become a hallmark of Bas' paintings. The artist brushes off any suggestion of psychosexual fixation, "I just have a type, I guess," he says. "But also, with this series, there's a certain nature to conceptual art, like in my experience with kids in art school, especially if you're a handsome young man, you can get away with almost anything in terms of art."
"The Conceptualists" seems to get away with a lot. There's the painter who exclusively paints portraits of his identical twin brother (in other words, self-portraits) and a photographer taping Polaroid selfies to milk cartons in a supermarket. There's a pillow-fighting match in a boxing ring and a guy making pointillist canvases using darts. One artist stands in the middle of an '80s prom cliché, surrounded by balloons and wearing a purple jacket and eight different flower boutonnieres from jilted dates. "His work is performance-based and centers around disappointment," Bas adds. Another makes sculptures out of Popsicle sticks but insists on procuring each one from actual Popsicles he eats himself; the scene shows him building his inevitable final work, his own Popsicle-stick coffin. Obvious craftsmanship and attention to detail aside, the series presents something rare in contemporary art: classically inclined, representational work meant to be purely funny.

"It's been a really fun series because I basically get to pretend to be another artist in a sense, and if you don't even like what the artists are doing, it's not my fault because it's their work, not mine," Bas says, laughing.

While his irascible, make-believe artists may achieve varying levels of success with their art, Bas quickly gained a reputation as an iconoclast. After graduating from the New World School of the Arts and dropping out after a semester at Cooper Union in New York, he and some high-school friends, including fellow artists Naomi Fisher and Alejandro Cardenas, organized a group show at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, "The Fashion Issue," riffing on the then-ascendant South Beach modeling industry.

From there, he went into stranger, queerer directions. Drawing from idyllic childhood adventures exploring the woods of Ocala and reading pulp sci-fi and supernatural fiction, he began exploring lost innocence and the travails of coming to terms with one's sexual preference as a young, gay male. Local tastemakers like the Rubells and de la Cruzes adored his work. Hernan's Merit and the Nouveau Sissies, at Snitzer Gallery, explored summer-camp longings and realizations. In 2002, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, then-director Bonnie Clearwater offered him a show where he put on "It's Super Natural," which was full of Hardy Boys-type adventure scenarios. In On the Jagged Shores, an exemplary work from the show now in the Rubell Museum, a lad searches a dark and spooky cliffside with a flashlight, failing to notice the ghostly rendezvous in the surrounding caves.
Shifting into a mode that channeled the 19th-century romantic and decadent movements, Bas soon began to accompany his 2D works with ambitious video and installation work. Black-and-white video work Fragile Moments took inspiration from Moby Dick, while 2004's The Aesthete's Toy combined an elaborate altar featuring candles and a golden turtle shell with a video of a man with his arms fondling his back, mimicking a make-out session. Snitzer recalls one installation from "It's Super Natural" designed to resemble a boys' wooden-plank clubhouse with a "No Girls Allowed" sign. A viewer could gaze through a peephole, similar to Duchamp's "Étant donnés," and see the apartment of an adult gay man.

"My memory is that he never flinched, he never stopped, he never didn't continue to evolve," Snitzer says.

In 2004, Bas landed a slot in the Whitney Biennial, which opened many doors. He's since been embraced by the art world, showing at blue-chip galleries like Victoria Miro, Perrotin, and Lehmann Maupin. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirschhorn in D.C., and other prestigious institutions around the world. His last museum show was in Malaga, Spain; before that was in Seoul and Shanghai.

In a sense, "The Conceptualists" marks something of a homecoming for Bas, who hasn't had a full-fledged museum show of new work since the MOCA presentation in 2002. Snitzer, who's known Bas for more than two decades, considers "The Conceptualists" a major achievement.

"It's spectacular, and the scope of it — 35 major works. Every single work in that show, there's no filler. It's extraordinary for a 46-year-old artist," he says. "And to put it in an international focus during Art Week serves the community well."

Bas, born in Miami to Cuban immigrants, may be one of the most prominent artists to emerge from the city. But he doesn't really sense that people associate him with the city or even clock him as Latino. "If I go anywhere else in the world or different parts of the country, especially if they haven't met me before and don't know me that well, they think I'm Dutch," he says. (The artist is listed on a Wikipedia page of famous people named Bas, between an Italian organist and a French gymnast.)
Bas' family has strong roots in Miami, going back to their flight from Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. "My grandfather was military in Cuba, and they ran in the night, basically," he says. He was the only Spanish-speaking kid in his class during the brief time his family lived in Ocala. When he began making art after his family moved back to the city, he ended up reacting against the typical aesthetic conventions found in Miami.

"Growing up here, I had the complete opposite reaction of not wanting to be tropical landscapes, not wanting to do what's surrounding me. I was more attracted to Southern Gothic — creepy swamps and deep, dark woods — as imagery because that was romantic to me. It was like, I wanted to be Peter Doig; I didn't want to be José Bedia."

Still, he finds it funny that so few have begged to consider why someone of his background would make art the way he does.

"A lot of people think I'm from Europe or something like they don't even think I'm American or nonetheless Cuban. So it's always funny to me," Bas reflects. "Almost any press you read of mine, there's no mention of me even being of Latin descent. It's very strange. It's just totally overlooked, maybe because they want to talk about being gay instead of Latin, like that's more interesting to them. That's fine; that's part of the story, too."

"Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists." Monday, December 4, through May 5, 2024, at the Bass, 2100 Collins Ave., Miami Beach; 305-673-7530; thebass.org. Tickets cost $8 to $15; free for members, Miami Beach residents, and children 6 and under.