HERNAN BAS: THE FIRST AND THE LAST

Perrotin presents The First and the Last by Hernan Bas. Featuring paintings and works on paper, the exhibition explores the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction, drawing viewers into a world where the extraordinary and the mundane collide.

April 13 – June 1, 2024

Bas’s work encourages us to reflect on the fragility of life and the nuances of human relationships. Taking inspiration from various sources, such as the recent case of a tourist caught carving his name on the Colosseum in Rome, the artist captivatingly explores the absurdities of existence as well as their poignant beauty.

Bas begins his paintings or drawings by making lists of titles, which he then converts into images using photographic montages. These images are then projected onto the canvas, to which he applies acrylic paint. In his new exhibition, he presents his drawings as stand-alone artworks for the first time.

Hernan Bas has been working to complete several pieces, such as his work on paper Finding the First Flock of Flamingos to Return to Florida in a Century, inspired by the recent return of pink flamingos to Florida, where Hernan Bas resides. These birds were hunted to extinction before being reintroduced from Cuba, where Bas’s family is originally from.

Hernan Bas combines the idea of vain competition with the desire – perhaps no less vain – of making a mark in history. He shows us ghostly traces on the ceiling of The Eagle pub in Cambridge, created by airmen during the Second World War using wax candles, lighters, and lipstick. In another drawing, a pupil seated at a school desk engraves words into wood in front of mathematical equations on a blackboard, like so many poetic riddles: “The end doesn’t even matter,” “his own name,” “I want pizza.”

Hernan Bas’s exhibition carries a profound sense of the end of the world, often intertwined with elements of humor. In The Last Day that Tower Was Standing, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is seemingly saved from collapse by a tourist’s hand, akin to a holiday snapshot. A man indulges in a final, extravagant meal before an asteroid’s imminent arrival.

Ailing in a hospital bed, a man prepares to utter his last words or perhaps to receive them in the form of a postcard... The presence of Picasso’s Guernica in the background of the large painting The Last Museum Guard at the Last Museum on Earth is too somber to elicit a smile. Hernan Bas doesn’t depict the accident; he hints at the impending catastrophe through ambiguous interludes.