Hernan Bas
25 Feb - 25 Mar 2006
HERNAN BAS
Dandies, Pansies & Prude
February 25th - March 25th
Daniel Reich Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Hernan Bas: Dandies, Pansies and Prudes opening Saturday February 25th from 6 - 8 pm.
A haphazard dandy himself, Bas codifies his subjects as a loose trinity of painted portraits: dandies, pansies and prudes: themes consistent with his study of gender, sexuality and difference and his enactment of art historical and literary symbols and tropes. Through ambiguous sloping spatial planes metaphysically evocative of both depth and foreground, Bas creates a seductively colorful landscape of somatic experience: Dickensian claustrophobia as in “The Old Curiosity Shop,” corporal surrender and repressed fantasy.
Bas’ earliest work drew on popular series, like the Hardy Boys, portraying androgynous boys (bound in homoerotic circumstance) struggling against adverse oceans of water swollen with intrepid line, recalling the Florida straight crossed by Cuban exiles. Bas draws upon this cultural difference, utilizing the literary formula of the blond as the dark haired boy’s (of other or implicitly “southern or eastern origin”) object of desire reflecting the way that difference and desire merge, staging florid Othello-like narratives complete with tragedy masks. Hence for Bas, popular and literary genres further the development of a personal and relevant sensuousness in fleshy, painterly landscapes where categorization becomes slippery.
It is worth noting as to Bas’s subject matter, that while we ostensibly live in a progressive society which “allows” the other tolerance (as evidenced by the representation of good homosexuals on television in programs like “Will and Grace”), gay history, albeit complex and ambiguous, is largely gleaned from police and medical records.
As dandyism (described by Baudelaire) is a strict code of conduct dictating an amazing rarity of existence, it is relevant to see Bas’ art making practice in terms of Genet-like ritual enactments translating into a performance of art history with metaphysical and imaginary insertions. In view of Bas’ use of the gothic (as synonymous with enclosure): subversive sexual practice, exemplified by Georges Bataille, who viewed brothels as true churches (or that in the Molly House (Gay Club) of Renaissance England (the dark room reserved for sex was called ‘The Chapel’), sexual experience can be articulated as a rite.
Hence in terms of enactment and revision, Bas recalls Fauvist “luxe” using “Madame Matisse (The Green Line)” by Henri Matisse as a point of departure for a series of men marked by green lines. In quoting an artist for whom the “woman” was an erotic instrument of formal examination, Bas devises a counterpoint to the contemporary super “male” kosher formality of gay representation expressed in a stock figure like the middle class ‘Chelsea boy’ and gender play is a key aspect of Bas’ work. Writing earnestly in 2002 as to the flexibility of representation, Bas remarked:
“In the recent past, young gay boys have had to develop a certain creative ingenuity when attempting to seek out images of same sex affection. Today gay youth has a much easier time finding such imagery. As a result, the “art of creatively misinterpreting” naively innocent representations of heterosexual camaraderie is dying off. My best work seeks to keep this art form alive. For a young gay reader, the underlying homosexuality in a series like “The Hardy Boys” is as suspicious as the plots they attempt to unravel. The very terms: suspicion, mystery, clues, secrets, etc., are closely allied to any gay youth’s experience. It describes the need to cover up one’s sexuality. To keep it cloaked to solve these mysteries, to express the charm of ambiguous sexuality...”
As far as popular representation of the queer as a grounds for the fantastical Bas writes:
“The first overtly gay character I recall was on the comedy TV Show “The Kids in the Hall” -- the 50’s queer, wearing a fur coat walking his dog (a fancy greyhound) down the sidewalk of a 50’s idealized neighborhood. This seemed amazing...”
As to this amazing rare quality Bas continues:
“Parker Tyler wrote about the Homosexual in cinema as being viewed as “...no more real or natural or viable than the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I wanted to paint fairies, I wanted to paint pansies covered in (floral) pansies, I wanted to paint the character that becomes a character by pretending not to be one (a prude). The Prude is the hardest to capture, is it the couple from Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’?”
In Bas’ paintings dandyism, bound to Catholicism and spirituality, marks a codified rejection of bourgeois life in contrast to more “productive” and revolutionary bohemian lifestyle. Similarly in art history, it can be argued that a pendulum swings between what is thought to be “feminine” or “decorative” and therefore ephemeral, and “critical” -- thought to be productive of legible dialogue. Beau Brummell, Barbey d’Aurevilley and Charles Baudelaire prescribed a strict code of conduct for the Dandy, one that accentuated difference in a society moving toward democratic uniformity. As Baudelaire wrote, “A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer, but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth.” It was Beau Brummell (1778-1840) who took a razor to his jacket, thus inventing the tailcoat, and the stark one-dimensional male silhouette that remains in fashion to this day. In accordance with Baudelaire the dandy appears to be most noteworthy “in periods of transition.” For instance, at the turn of the 19th century, the Dandy merged with theories of decadence in narratives such as Huysman’s Au Rebours (or in Thomas Mann’s novels set around the world wars), which placed him at the end of a descending family line -- too weak to reproduce and therefore beyond social “function.” Brideshead Revisited, by Evelen Waugh, recalls the foppish Oxford of Harold Acton in the early twenties as remembered in the grey atmosphere proceeding World War II. The turbulence of the 60’s saw first the original mods with their sleek silhouette and face paint then figures such as Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones emerged, recalling the super opulence of the earliest Dandies verging on the pansy. And Bas’ thematic suggest that the present is such “a period of transition.”
While the dandy is a linear contained figure, the pansy (originally a term of derision) is polymorphous, volumetric and carnivalesque, often described as stereotypically female, even “disgusting ladies” according to Louis Carler. The figure of the Pansy is both a glyph for homosexuality and a handbook for its signification, and in this confusion a character is created. As the Dandy is effete, the pansy’s very body is completely at odds with heterosexual imperatives. For instance, the pansy in his effusiveness is comparable to the “molly” of Renaissance England, who Neil Ward (according to Alan Bray) believed “really fancy themselves as women, imitating all the little vanities that custom has reconciled to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy, cry, scold, and to mimic all manner of effeminacy that has ever fallen within their several observations...”Such accounts offer disorder in their descriptive play, evoking a man with useless genitals performing not a functional act but an inconsequential dance while murmuring and emitting babble (perhaps evoking the art historical contrast between the critical (meaningful) and the pretty (ephemeral). Hence speech and action become superfluous, hysterical and surrealist - an ontological fantasy reflected in Bas’ paintings.
The most mysterious of this trinity is the “prude.” As the somatic site of repressed desire, he is ripe for projection with his eternally unrealized sexuality enmeshed in shame, relating distantly to the Hardy Boys. The term prude is an ellipsis of “preudefemme” (a discreet modest woman) as opposed to “prud-homme” (a brave man). In 1704, Molliere used “prude” to describe an “excessively prim or demure women,” furthering the marginality of the male prude. In terms of Baudelaire’s “periods of transition,” Guy Hocquenghem, writing in 1972 of the wake of Paris 1968, a time in which all seemed possible. Citing Ferenczi, Hocquenghem wrote of a prude disturbed by the immodesty of an officer whose window faced his own:
“That man [the prude] was in the habit of writing letters to report the fact that an officer who lived opposite him “shaved himself at the window... with a bare chest.” He kept mentioning the officer’s underpants... [Ferenczi wrote] “It made me suspicious... that he handed me a mass of newspaper cuttings, documents and pamphlets numbered and sorted... all of which he had written himself...” ...the patient accuses the military authorities of believing him to be “an old woman”... seeking for the objects of her curiosity...”
While the prude is the psychoanalyst’s model given his spouting of garbled sexual content and negation, he is also necessary in a society increasingly squared off by the terms heterosexual and gay.
Bas describes a less censorious prude observed in gay life today:
“A prude is defined more by actions than appearance... I’m painting him in two distinct postures; when his guard is down and when it is up. In “The Prude, ribbons after the party,” he has given up and surrendered himself to embellishment, and for the prude this is a slightly “OK” manner of giving in. In “The Prude, hands on” our leading man is touched by invisible hands; the only kind that he can allow...”
© Hernan Bas
Dandies, Pansies & Prude
February 25th - March 25th
Daniel Reich Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Hernan Bas: Dandies, Pansies and Prudes opening Saturday February 25th from 6 - 8 pm.
A haphazard dandy himself, Bas codifies his subjects as a loose trinity of painted portraits: dandies, pansies and prudes: themes consistent with his study of gender, sexuality and difference and his enactment of art historical and literary symbols and tropes. Through ambiguous sloping spatial planes metaphysically evocative of both depth and foreground, Bas creates a seductively colorful landscape of somatic experience: Dickensian claustrophobia as in “The Old Curiosity Shop,” corporal surrender and repressed fantasy.
Bas’ earliest work drew on popular series, like the Hardy Boys, portraying androgynous boys (bound in homoerotic circumstance) struggling against adverse oceans of water swollen with intrepid line, recalling the Florida straight crossed by Cuban exiles. Bas draws upon this cultural difference, utilizing the literary formula of the blond as the dark haired boy’s (of other or implicitly “southern or eastern origin”) object of desire reflecting the way that difference and desire merge, staging florid Othello-like narratives complete with tragedy masks. Hence for Bas, popular and literary genres further the development of a personal and relevant sensuousness in fleshy, painterly landscapes where categorization becomes slippery.
It is worth noting as to Bas’s subject matter, that while we ostensibly live in a progressive society which “allows” the other tolerance (as evidenced by the representation of good homosexuals on television in programs like “Will and Grace”), gay history, albeit complex and ambiguous, is largely gleaned from police and medical records.
As dandyism (described by Baudelaire) is a strict code of conduct dictating an amazing rarity of existence, it is relevant to see Bas’ art making practice in terms of Genet-like ritual enactments translating into a performance of art history with metaphysical and imaginary insertions. In view of Bas’ use of the gothic (as synonymous with enclosure): subversive sexual practice, exemplified by Georges Bataille, who viewed brothels as true churches (or that in the Molly House (Gay Club) of Renaissance England (the dark room reserved for sex was called ‘The Chapel’), sexual experience can be articulated as a rite.
Hence in terms of enactment and revision, Bas recalls Fauvist “luxe” using “Madame Matisse (The Green Line)” by Henri Matisse as a point of departure for a series of men marked by green lines. In quoting an artist for whom the “woman” was an erotic instrument of formal examination, Bas devises a counterpoint to the contemporary super “male” kosher formality of gay representation expressed in a stock figure like the middle class ‘Chelsea boy’ and gender play is a key aspect of Bas’ work. Writing earnestly in 2002 as to the flexibility of representation, Bas remarked:
“In the recent past, young gay boys have had to develop a certain creative ingenuity when attempting to seek out images of same sex affection. Today gay youth has a much easier time finding such imagery. As a result, the “art of creatively misinterpreting” naively innocent representations of heterosexual camaraderie is dying off. My best work seeks to keep this art form alive. For a young gay reader, the underlying homosexuality in a series like “The Hardy Boys” is as suspicious as the plots they attempt to unravel. The very terms: suspicion, mystery, clues, secrets, etc., are closely allied to any gay youth’s experience. It describes the need to cover up one’s sexuality. To keep it cloaked to solve these mysteries, to express the charm of ambiguous sexuality...”
As far as popular representation of the queer as a grounds for the fantastical Bas writes:
“The first overtly gay character I recall was on the comedy TV Show “The Kids in the Hall” -- the 50’s queer, wearing a fur coat walking his dog (a fancy greyhound) down the sidewalk of a 50’s idealized neighborhood. This seemed amazing...”
As to this amazing rare quality Bas continues:
“Parker Tyler wrote about the Homosexual in cinema as being viewed as “...no more real or natural or viable than the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I wanted to paint fairies, I wanted to paint pansies covered in (floral) pansies, I wanted to paint the character that becomes a character by pretending not to be one (a prude). The Prude is the hardest to capture, is it the couple from Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’?”
In Bas’ paintings dandyism, bound to Catholicism and spirituality, marks a codified rejection of bourgeois life in contrast to more “productive” and revolutionary bohemian lifestyle. Similarly in art history, it can be argued that a pendulum swings between what is thought to be “feminine” or “decorative” and therefore ephemeral, and “critical” -- thought to be productive of legible dialogue. Beau Brummell, Barbey d’Aurevilley and Charles Baudelaire prescribed a strict code of conduct for the Dandy, one that accentuated difference in a society moving toward democratic uniformity. As Baudelaire wrote, “A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer, but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth.” It was Beau Brummell (1778-1840) who took a razor to his jacket, thus inventing the tailcoat, and the stark one-dimensional male silhouette that remains in fashion to this day. In accordance with Baudelaire the dandy appears to be most noteworthy “in periods of transition.” For instance, at the turn of the 19th century, the Dandy merged with theories of decadence in narratives such as Huysman’s Au Rebours (or in Thomas Mann’s novels set around the world wars), which placed him at the end of a descending family line -- too weak to reproduce and therefore beyond social “function.” Brideshead Revisited, by Evelen Waugh, recalls the foppish Oxford of Harold Acton in the early twenties as remembered in the grey atmosphere proceeding World War II. The turbulence of the 60’s saw first the original mods with their sleek silhouette and face paint then figures such as Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones emerged, recalling the super opulence of the earliest Dandies verging on the pansy. And Bas’ thematic suggest that the present is such “a period of transition.”
While the dandy is a linear contained figure, the pansy (originally a term of derision) is polymorphous, volumetric and carnivalesque, often described as stereotypically female, even “disgusting ladies” according to Louis Carler. The figure of the Pansy is both a glyph for homosexuality and a handbook for its signification, and in this confusion a character is created. As the Dandy is effete, the pansy’s very body is completely at odds with heterosexual imperatives. For instance, the pansy in his effusiveness is comparable to the “molly” of Renaissance England, who Neil Ward (according to Alan Bray) believed “really fancy themselves as women, imitating all the little vanities that custom has reconciled to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy, cry, scold, and to mimic all manner of effeminacy that has ever fallen within their several observations...”Such accounts offer disorder in their descriptive play, evoking a man with useless genitals performing not a functional act but an inconsequential dance while murmuring and emitting babble (perhaps evoking the art historical contrast between the critical (meaningful) and the pretty (ephemeral). Hence speech and action become superfluous, hysterical and surrealist - an ontological fantasy reflected in Bas’ paintings.
The most mysterious of this trinity is the “prude.” As the somatic site of repressed desire, he is ripe for projection with his eternally unrealized sexuality enmeshed in shame, relating distantly to the Hardy Boys. The term prude is an ellipsis of “preudefemme” (a discreet modest woman) as opposed to “prud-homme” (a brave man). In 1704, Molliere used “prude” to describe an “excessively prim or demure women,” furthering the marginality of the male prude. In terms of Baudelaire’s “periods of transition,” Guy Hocquenghem, writing in 1972 of the wake of Paris 1968, a time in which all seemed possible. Citing Ferenczi, Hocquenghem wrote of a prude disturbed by the immodesty of an officer whose window faced his own:
“That man [the prude] was in the habit of writing letters to report the fact that an officer who lived opposite him “shaved himself at the window... with a bare chest.” He kept mentioning the officer’s underpants... [Ferenczi wrote] “It made me suspicious... that he handed me a mass of newspaper cuttings, documents and pamphlets numbered and sorted... all of which he had written himself...” ...the patient accuses the military authorities of believing him to be “an old woman”... seeking for the objects of her curiosity...”
While the prude is the psychoanalyst’s model given his spouting of garbled sexual content and negation, he is also necessary in a society increasingly squared off by the terms heterosexual and gay.
Bas describes a less censorious prude observed in gay life today:
“A prude is defined more by actions than appearance... I’m painting him in two distinct postures; when his guard is down and when it is up. In “The Prude, ribbons after the party,” he has given up and surrendered himself to embellishment, and for the prude this is a slightly “OK” manner of giving in. In “The Prude, hands on” our leading man is touched by invisible hands; the only kind that he can allow...”
© Hernan Bas