About the Work
The young man in Hernan Bas’s The Albino in the Moonlight Garden exudes a haunting, Dorian Gray-esque beauty. Representative of Bas’s interest in Gothic youth, the subject is an androgynous waif, innocently rendered yet exuding a dark tension.
The composition plays with the idea of negative space: the striking white of the albino, the garden, and the moonlight are rendered in stark contrast to the surrounding darkness of the night. The painterly quality of the print betrays the conventional characteristics of lithograph, reading almost like a watercolor with an abstracted background.
About the Artist
Hernan Bas explores the world of homoerotic art with a wink and a nod to a traditional Romantic painting style. He often employs Gothic themes, combinations of romance and horror that are wrought with a sexual tension that conveys quiet emotion as opposed to hyper eroticism. In each work, Bas tells a tale that illustrates an intense sensitivity toward his subject.
Darkly playful and melancholic, Bas’s work references literature from Moby Dick to the Hardy Boys to French Romantic writing, reimagining them in terms of the young homosexual dandy. The mood of his art alludes to aspects of Decadence—a movement associated with Oscar Wilde and artists who favored art and artifice over Romantic description—and nihilism—the philosophy that all values are baseless. Bas says, “What’s the harm in signing over your soul for the sake of love if you don’t believe in hell, or if you do, you’ll be going there anyway for kissing boys?”
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