Reluctant heroes, latent desires and tacit understandings populate Hernan Bas’ often imposing landscapes. Fluorescent hues pop out from macabre palettes while tropical waterfowl take their place against mythic backdrops, and the sexual tension between youthful figures is sometimes so palpable that it takes you back to when holding hands was the ultimate score. Despite an artistic biography full of labels, Bas’ own personality is harder to place. A bag of intriguing contradictions, Bas presents himself like the biggest sci-fi dork in your junior-high biology class - occasionally with the poise and gusto of a virtuoso tenor.

A few years ago Hernan Bas was to the art world, at most, a promising Miami talent with a distinctly gay oeuvre, painting in the shadow of the better-known Elizabeth Peyton. It is now safe to say that Bas has emerged from the fog of obscurity, brush in hand: With canvases occasionally raking in as much as houses, a recent retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, concurrent New York and Venice solo shows and an inclusion at this year’s Venice Biennale, Bas is riding today’s wave of rising art stars.

Biography and persona count for a lot on the art scene; for this reason Bas’ roots have followed him closely: Some people go for the “immigrant” story (bogus as it may be), and Bas is still very much a “Miami” artist, despite gallery representation which spans the globe. Then there’s the gay thing. Bas has been out for as long as he’s shown his art, and he’s never been bashful. Though the painter’s latest works favor literary and art historical references over his overtly homoerotic depictions of Hardy Boys-esque manchildren and earlier autobiographical themes - like his celebration of the male waif in his 2000 solo show "Slim Fast" - Bas’ current works unquestionably remain the brainchildren of a uniquely creative queer mind.

I met with the artist at the Brooklyn Museum, after the debut of miamiHeights: Hernan
Bas, a film documenting the last year in Bas’ career and his ascent to success.
DL: So, who are the boys?

HB: Huh?

DL: In your videos and paintings.

HB: Oh. In the videos they’re pretty much all me. Except for the one with the arms [where you see a guy from the back, hugging himself to look like he’s making out with someone]. Freddy was actually my assistant at the time. That video kind of came out of nowhere. I was like, “Freddy, you know that thing? Go do it in the corner!” I kept thinking of that song: “All By Myself.” One of those weird little moments. I love that video, because I feel like I kind of beat another artist to the chase by filming that. Sort of one of those things everyone knows, like a Bruce Nauman moment in a way.

DL: But do you use models at all for your paintings?

HB: It varies. Lately, it’s more of historical reference work. So I’m looking at all the Futurist operas and plays of the 20s. A lot of it’s found photos from that time period, or loosely based on those. Sometimes, if I can’t figure out the right position of the body, I’ll just photograph myself and change the face. Or just use fashion magazines. You can have these girls with no tits, just lop off what little they have and then turn them into a cute boy. It’s not hard to do.

DL: So then, is the ephebic look some type of internal self-portrait, or is that something that you’re actually drawn to, externally? Why the attraction to adolescence as subject matter?
HB: I think it’s a mix. When I was younger that was me. The figures I draw have grown up alongside me. My “boys” are entering their thirties, too.

DL: That’s exciting to hear.

HB: Twinks are nice, but I’m not attracted. I was just at this party last night down in Miami. It’s like this music conference with all these electronic kids. At this party it was this band Matt and Kim - they’re actually from Brooklyn - they have a tween following, so it’s like all these young, young kids. I felt fucking old. Everyone who was there was under twenty years old, and these cute, little, scrawny gay boys come up to me. I’m like, “No. Sorry I can’t do that. Show me some ID. This is wrong.”

DL: It’s funny you should say that. I think that, not having met you but having seen your work, and seeing your vibrant hot pinks and all the ephebes and the lush landscape, it’s easy to imagine you leading this crazy, gay, Miami lifestyle of drugs and orgies.

HB: I am so much more boring than that! Surprisingly so. I don’t even go to South Beach.

DL: Where do you like to go in Miami? What do you do when you’re not painting?

HB: I kind of want to know that myself. I was walking the other day, and I live right on the bay, on the other side of South Beach. At the end of the street you can see below the bay when you’re walking to the studio, and I was looking out. There were all these boats in the bay, and everyone was just having a fabulous, Miami time. I’m walking into the studio, and I’m like, oh my God, I live in Miami, and I don’t live here at all! I wanna be on a boat! Give me some goddamn champagne!

DL: Why don’t you just move to Oklahoma? I’m sure the studios are even cheaper there.

HB: Well, I just bought a house in Detroit. You can’t get any farther away from everything than there. My boyfriend kind of grew up there. And you can also get an eight-bedroom mansion for the price of a studio apartment anywhere in Miami.

DL: Will you guys be splitting your time then?

HB: Yeah, we named the house the “Hamptons House", because we’re going to summer there. I think it’s great to summer in Detroit instead of the Hamptons.

DL: Especially since your go-to drink is Bud Light! So, do you often use the word “summer” as a verb?

HB: I do now, I guess! But it’s nice. I mean, talk about a place to get away. Ain’t no one gonna bother me there!

DL: Coming back to Miami, though, I grew up in North Florida, so I find the lush landscape you reference in your works particularly magical and exciting.

HB: I was born in Miami, but actually, before I can remember, when I was a few months old, my parents moved to Ocala, Florida. My mom was not mentally stable, so I was like three or four years old, and I was allowed to just wander off into the woods by myself. Talk about having a weird memory of childhood. I swear I saw unicorns. It was like out of Legend or something. And there were, like, the Bigfoot sightings and the escaped panthers from the railroad [car] that tipped over a few miles away. It was completely bizarre-o world. It was clay roads where we lived - it wasn’t paved yet. That’s where my whole fascination with the supernatural started, too. Weird shit happened up there. It was like the X-Files up there, I swear. Northern Florida to me is like the frickin’ X-Files.

DL: In Wet Heat Project’s documentary miamiHeights: Hernan Bas, the mayor of Miami says that he actually identifies with your work. What do you think of that?

HB: I was like, you’re wearing a pink tie; you’d better be careful what you’re saying! [Laughs] I’ve never even met the guy. I didn’t even know he was there. That was weird.

DL: I think it really says something about how far our society has come, and particularly surprising, since he’s Cuban-American as well. Actually, I was reading a review of your show at Daniel Reich Gallery from 2003…

HB: [under his breath] Bastard.

DL: That was one of the kinder reviews, I have to tell you.

HB: Oh, no no. I was talking about Daniel, not the reviewer.

DL: Shall that be off the record?

HB: Well, there’s no mystery in it. We don’t get along.

DL: So that’s on the record?

HB: Oh yeah, I mean he won’t even return my phone calls.

DL: All right. It’s on the record. Anyway, the reviewer said you had discovered that the category of “gay” was more interesting than the category of “artist.” How does throwing “Cuban” into that trifecta spice things up?

HB: It’s kind of weird, because Rosa de la Cruz [one of my supporters/collectors] was a huge supporter of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who’s an icon of Cuban gay art. He was one of my heroes, too. I love his work.

DL: And he’s a conceptual artist, which you apparently aspire to be.

HB: Yeah. Who’d have thought it? I like the ideas, but […] I don’t really think about it at all. Especially the Cuban part. I don’t think about that at all. My mom and dad were both born there, but they moved to the States years and years ago. My father’s father was a military man, so he was allowed to leave the country legally. He wasn’t on the flotillas, so they came here right when Castro came in.

DL: That was a while ago. How do you feel about still being portrayed by the art world and the media as an immigrant? What the hell is that?

HB: I grew up in Ocala. Nothing really “immigrant” about that.

DL: Not at all!

HB: It’s a story. It’s always good, storylines. It’s like having a tagline. If that makes people want to pay more attention to you, then that’s fine. It’s not exactly hurting me.

DL: Towards the end of the documentary there’s a quotation from artist Rachel Feinstein about how, “if you look at an Art Forum from the 70s, you won’t even recognize most of the artists in it.”

HB: I love that quote! I think about it a lot, too. It’s completely true.

DL: Don’t you find it scary, though, too?

HB: It’s both. It’s horrifying. Back to when I was in the Whitney Biennial [in 2004], even - I was looking at that catalogue, and there are maybe four people in that whole show that people are still talking about.

DL: Who are they?

HB: Terence Koh, Chloe Piene, Sue de Beer.

DL: And you! Tada!

HB: [mumbles]

DL: So why did you get kicked out of Cooper Union?

HB: I stopped going to classes. I just wasn’t into it.

DL: Do you think you’re better off for it?

HB: Oh, long-term, absolutely.

DL: Now that you’re in New York more and more, and you seem to be having more success here, to you feel any pressure to really set up here?

HB: I’ve lived here before. I kept a place in Greenpoint [Brooklyn] for probably a year and a half or so, and I would come up pretty often. Back then I would come up to New York a lot more. I just got to the point that I wasn’t coming up enough, and it was a waste of money.

DL: Do you feel any animosity from New York artists? Isn’t there a sense here that you have to be in New York to successful as an artist?

HB: The weirdest phenomenon I’ve seen is people moving to Miami to become artists. From New York. People are really falling for the idea that you can make a name for yourself down there, which is like bizarre world for me. I mean, it took ten or twelve years for me to land in this situation. It’s kind of weird that someone from New York who finished Columbia grad school would go down there and all of a sudden [expect to make it there].

DL: You think that’s a result of the bigger fish/smaller pond theory?

HB: That could have a lot to do with it. Definitely  There’s not a lot of competition early on, really. It’s not necessarily that everyone else is bad, but just the numbers game - the number of artists is miniscule. Not so much anymore, but early on, around the year 2000 you couldn’t even fill this auditorium with the artists that I knew in Miami. It’s a small crowd. And there’s Sunday painters and the Jewish retiree crew…

DL: To be honest, I think most people move from New York to Miami to die - not to make it big. Pretty much the opposite trajectory, really.

HB: Yeah. Pretty much.

DL: Do you feel that there’s a different artist culture in Miami than here?

HB: Sadly, I feel like I’ve kind of lost touch with the New York crew that I used to hang out with and kind of knew. The scene and, you know, the Dan Colens and the Dash Snows of the world. I don’t really hang out with those kids anymore. I think in Miami everyone’s trying to make it for the sake of being able to pay their rent. I’m sure that’s the case in New York, too, but here it’s sometimes feels a little bit more about fame than anything else. That’s what it seems like to me. I mean, I don’t really care if I’m in V Magazine this month, you know.

DL: Are you in V Magazine this month?

HB: No, no. I just mean I don’t care if I am.

DL: That’s something that surprised me, actually. I wasn’t prepared for you to be this down-to-earth. Do you think that has to do with your success being so recent? Or maybe because you’re a Miami artist and not a New York artist?

HB: I think being in Miami helps that a lot. It’s really humbling, because you can’t brag about anything, because your competition is your friends. If they’re not doing as well as you, you’re not going to boas. It’s really humbling to not be around other artists that are having a lot of success. In New York, you go out to a party, and there’s your Terence Koh and your Dana Schutz, and it’s sort of an even playing field in a sense. But in Miami I don’t even tell people what I’m doing unless they ask.

DL: Do you think that being around other “successful” artists would propel you to do more?

HB: I don’t know that I’d want to be around them.

DL: In the movie you talk about how you’re afraid of the “white demon”: the primed canvas. So you’ve developed an elaborate way of priming your canvas with colorful abstraction before you start working on the painting. Do you do that with all your canvases?

HB: Not so much the little ones, but the larger ones, they all start off as a giant Cy Twombly or a de Kooning painting, just to put something on there, and it just sort of evolves from there.

DL: And that primer for the canvas gives way to the forms that eventually come through.

HB: Yeah. It’s like a Magic 8 Ball in a way.

DL: How much do you plan or sketch before you actually begin a large work?

HB: Well, with the Ubu Roi painting [on view at Lehmann Maupin], once I knew that I was doing that narrative, then I started to do actual sketches, and I’ll draw on sheets of velum and tape them up so I can see where that’s going to attach to something else…But sometimes it’s just like a free-for-all. And, I have to admit, sometimes it is just like a big, old abstract landscape that I love, and I’ll just stick a boy in there!

DL: Or two. And a flamingo.

HB: A flamingo never hurts. Lately I’m into spoonbills instead.

DL: So Florida! The wildlife really screams “home” to me.

HB: I love that I can get away with painting flamingos. I don’t know if I could do that anywhere else.
DL: You’re bringing in these very kitsch aspects into works with high art references. Like The Great Barrier Wreath, the triptych in your retrospective, which looks vaguely Boschian. Do you think to yourself, “woohoo, I got away with it!”?

HB: A little bit, sure. Doesn’t hurt. That’s one of the benefits of being a Miami artist; you can get away with a little bit of the kitsch. I really don’t know, if I had lived in New York for the last ten years, if I could really get away with painting some of the things I paint. The fluorescents, too. Well, I guess other people do fluorescents, too, but there’s something sort of Miami and campy about it.

DL: So tell me about this Ubu Roi guy.

HB: A friend of mine gave me a book on absinthe, and its history in relation to art. And… my way of thinking sort of collapses on itself - I call it the Google effect - It’s like one thing touches off another idea, which leads to this, which leads to that. And in the absinthe book I read about Alfred Jarry, who wrote Ubu Roi, and he was a massive absinthe fiend. And, then, me being into that painting. For my show at Lehmann Maupin, it’s all based on Russian Futurism and the 20s and the Absurdist theater and performance art, which also, again, has such a cliché of tackiness to it. Want to turn somebody off? Say “I do performance art.” Then, [in a different voice] “I heard you do performance art. I don’t want to date you!”


DL: Don’t you think you’re in a safe enough place now that you could branch off a little and…

HB: Oh, but I wouldn’t want to do performance art! I’m just saying, the term “performance art” has a stigma to it. So, I like the idea of playing with unpopular forms of expression. I’m this close to painting a mime. This close! If you had told me five years ago I would paint a harlequin, I would have laughed in your face.

DL: You say that having a show in New York makes you nervous in a way that having a show in London does not.

HB: Yeah, it’s weird. I think I said it in the film best. It’s just New York is, I don’t know. It’s that in-the-gutter-looking-at-the-stars thing or something! It still freaks me out. I think it’s also that I don’t know as many people in London, and maybe that helps, too.

DL: What do you typically like to do while you’re here in New York?

HB: My favorite place in New York is definitely the Met. MoMA’s great, but I kind of like visiting the old classics. Every time I go to the Met I discover a whole wing of the museum that I never knew existed before.

DL: Is there a section you try to avoid?

HB: I’m not super into medieval.

DL: For me it’s the musical instruments.

HB: I still haven’t found the music room. I was talking about this with someone the other day, and it’s like on some sub-level. Someone told me it’s above the armory, whatever that means.

DL: The arms and armor?

HB: Yeah.