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Descriptif du lot
A young man crouches in a rowing boat, his arms wrapped around his shoulders. His piercing blue gaze meets the viewer’s with an intimate expression, as if at an invisible companion across the deck. A cornucopian haul of fish—including a hammerhead shark—is strewn across a bed of netting and tackle, but appears beneath the youth’s attention. Their brightly coloured eyes echo his own. Behind the boat the blinking lights of a coastal city are reflected in the water. In All Eyes on Him (2021), Hernan Bas creates a lucid and mysterious nighttime scene. Who is his subject looking at—and how have they come to acquire their spoils? Executed in acrylic on linen, the painting has a dreamlike, aqueous mood. Using a rich array of brushstrokes and textures, Bas deftly renders the fishes’ sleek skin, the rugged weave of the nets, the knit of the young man’s scarlet top and the marks of tiredness around his eyes.
Born in Miami to a Cuban family but raised in the nearby Ocala forests, Bas often captures a sense of adventure in his work, whether terrestrial or nautical. His paintings evoke ambiguous narratives, leaving their viewer to arrive at their own conclusions. Many of them are inspired by literature, in particular the Romantic and Symbolist writers of the late nineteenth century at their most impassioned and gothic. All Eyes on Him relates to a 2021 series inspired by ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ stories and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which follows a Cuban fisherman’s quest to harpoon a gargantuan marlin. While Hemingway’s Santiago ultimately fails to bring his catch in, Bas’s protagonist has handsomely succeeded, as if making up for the novel’s futility.
Bas’s works star waifish young men, wistfully positioned between youth and adulthood, innocence and experience. Although they are often taken from online photographs of male models, Bas imbues them with a penetrating psychological depth. As the artist explains, they ‘are all just Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye to me: it’s the cliché of the youth who doesn’t know where he is in life. I’ve basically been painting that character for my entire career’ (quoted in C. Higgins, ‘Hernan Bas on hiding from the world in Venice’, The Guardian, 5 May 2026). These men stand on the threshold of the unknown, ruminating on their role in a strange, labyrinthine world. Enigmatic yet empathetic, and startling in its nocturnal beauty, All Eyes on Him offers an invitation to wonder.
Born in Miami to a Cuban family but raised in the nearby Ocala forests, Bas often captures a sense of adventure in his work, whether terrestrial or nautical. His paintings evoke ambiguous narratives, leaving their viewer to arrive at their own conclusions. Many of them are inspired by literature, in particular the Romantic and Symbolist writers of the late nineteenth century at their most impassioned and gothic. All Eyes on Him relates to a 2021 series inspired by ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ stories and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which follows a Cuban fisherman’s quest to harpoon a gargantuan marlin. While Hemingway’s Santiago ultimately fails to bring his catch in, Bas’s protagonist has handsomely succeeded, as if making up for the novel’s futility.
Bas’s works star waifish young men, wistfully positioned between youth and adulthood, innocence and experience. Although they are often taken from online photographs of male models, Bas imbues them with a penetrating psychological depth. As the artist explains, they ‘are all just Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye to me: it’s the cliché of the youth who doesn’t know where he is in life. I’ve basically been painting that character for my entire career’ (quoted in C. Higgins, ‘Hernan Bas on hiding from the world in Venice’, The Guardian, 5 May 2026). These men stand on the threshold of the unknown, ruminating on their role in a strange, labyrinthine world. Enigmatic yet empathetic, and startling in its nocturnal beauty, All Eyes on Him offers an invitation to wonder.