Hernan Bas

Hernan Bas, born in 1978 into a family of Cuban immigrants, spent his childhood between Miami and the remote town of Ocala in northern Florida. He currently lives and works in Miami. Drawing on literature, mythology, art history, theatre and popular culture, Bas constructs richly narrative, imaginary worlds in which beauty, desire, melancholy and the absurd coexist. His pictorial language is informed by Romanticism and Symbolism, as well as by nineteenth-century Decadent writers such as Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Storytelling is central to Bas’s practice: the young male protagonist — often appearing as a Victorian dandy, dreamer, adventurer or outsider — continues throughout his oeuvre, while the narratives constructed around him have grown increasingly complex. Funerals, cemeteries and other references to mortality recur in his work, associating these figures with death and the fragility of life.

Ubu Roi (The War March) (2009) is a monumental canvas that hangs like a tapestry along the extended wall of the Iannaccone studio’s conference room. Inspired by Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play Ubu Roi (1896), the painting centres on the grotesque King Ubu, a figure embodying greed, stupidity and the abuse of power. Bas transforms Ubu’s military campaign into a fantastical procession: beneath a stormy sky, masked and costumed figures emerge from an imaginary city and follow their ridiculous king along a precarious path towards an abyss.

The painting brings together references to absurdist theatre, Futurism, Cubist stage design and fairy-tale imagery. The flat, geometric architecture of the city contrasts with the intense, almost abstract brushwork of the surrounding landscape. What initially appears as a fantastical parade gradually reveals a darker satire: a foolish leader advances towards catastrophe while the crowd blindly follows him.