Hernan Bas, Downhill at Dusk (The Runaway), 2008. Estimate $70,000 - 100,000. New Now New York.
In Hernan Bas’ Downhill at Dusk (The Runaway), a suited traveler makes his way through an extraordinary forest. Lush, unknowable flora grows beside a stream, while the traveler contemplates his next steps. Tropical and bright, the forest serves a kind of mystic experience, at once natural and theatrical. Painted in 2008, Downhill at Dusk (The Runaway) is about the restless possibility granted by imagination—and coming-of-age; it is about not knowing what will come next.
When Bas created the work, he explained that his ambition was to place “the outcasts and vagabond waifs” at the center of the story, “I have always related my paintings as being a stage in and of themselves, the curtains having just parted to reveal a scene where something is about to unfold.” Downhill at Dusk (The Runaway) captures that sense of potential, the search for meaning in nature. It is what Oscar Wilde, one of Bas’ inspirations, described in De Profundis as, “The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature…It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.”
Downhill at Dusk (The Runaway) comes up for auction in the New Now sale on March 3, with portions of Phillips’ proceeds benefitting World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an organization working to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to diversity of life on Earth. The partnership celebrates the United Nations World Wildlife Day 2021 that puts the theme of “Forests and Livelihoods: Sustaining people and planet” into the spotlight.
Described by the artist as evocative of the abundant Floridian landscape, Downhill at Dusk (The Runaway) provides an apt point of departure to revisit Oscar Wilde’s late nineteenth century poem, In the Forest. The poem highlights the mystical longing proposed by Wilde and Bas both—and the endless hope that wildlife has inspired, for centuries.
In The Forest
Oscar Wilde
Out of the mid-wood's twilight
Into the meadow's dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!
He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!
O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!
Recommended Reading
The Artists of the Tiroche DeLeon Collection >
Art that Uplifts: How RxArt Inspires Patients and Frontline Workers >