VCU AT PRATT 

EXCHANGE SHOW 

Bas Jan Adder

"I want to do a piece where I go to the Alps and talk to a mountain. The mountain will talk of things which are necessary and always true, and I shall talk of things which are sometimes, accidentally true."

Hernan Bas’s paintings explore the codes of dandyism and its subculture as a means to define sexual attraction. Bas’s paintings are small, frail and sensuously delightful; through their unassuming intimacy, they personify epic romance. Influence by historical painting, Hernan Bas’s images contemporaneity, their staginess and immediate familiarity suggest the melodramatic narratives of classic film.

Heavily influenced by The Decadence period of literature, Hernan Bas’s paintings are inspired by well-worn pages of Wilde and Huysmans. “Why does homosexuality seem to make you pre-disposed to liking these things?” Bas questions. “As a result this work is tainted with Saint Sebastian martyr types, dying dandies and peacock feathers, all the materials that dictate a certain queer vocabulary." Hernan Bas’s style of painting emulates linguistic flourish. Impassioned brushwork and pastel hues bloom with poetic description; environments are set with the divine ambience of transience. Confined by fanciful etiquette, Hernan Bas’s figures allude to darker sentiments. Their posed innocence is but a thin veil of gentlemanly decorum.

Hernan Bas’s paintings are tinged with a nihilist romanticism, born of literary intrigue and a passion for historical painting. Exploring the possibilities of dandyism in the modern world, Hernan Bas’s bitter-sweet subject matter ranges from Greek mythology to contemporary genre painting, always derived from his connoisseur’s predilection for the poetic and empyreal. Funerals and cemeteries appear often in Hernan Bas’s work, inspiring thoughts of Keats's gothic malaise and the tragedy of lost love condemned to an eternally angelic slumber.

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Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer’s artistic practice is founded on a consideration of the nature of substances, the act of making, and the unpredictable processes that can result from combining the two. With an extraordinarily wide range of materials—Styrofoam, clay, mirrors, fruit, wax, wood, glass, paint, sawdust, and silicone, to name a few—he resuscitates art historical genres such as still lifes, nudes, portraits, and landscapes in potent sculptures that reflect the complexity, wonder, and banality of everyday life. His works reverberate with material transformation and decay as well as with poetic internal collisions and contradictions that cause his sculptures to oscillate between seeming beautiful or ugly, elegant or awkward, graceful or burdened.

Jennifer Bornstein

Jennifer Bornstein: Greengrassi