Miami, Florida - Inside Hernan Bas' room in a pleasant apartment on Biscayne Boulevard, an absurd mass of empty Budweiser tallboys - accumulated over several days - stand below an old Trinitron TV. We were supposed to go to South Beach modspot, the Marlin Bar, for 2-for-1s, but instead, Bas is seated on his bed, fanning his tears as he watches the end of The Sixth Sense.

On the walls are posters of effeminate male models, artist Joseph Beuys and an exhibit called Domestic Porn ; record covers of Pat Benatar's Invincible and A-Ha's Take on Me; and postings of work that will be shown at his debut solo show in New York (mawkishly titled My Incommunicable Woe ) at the Daniel Reich Gallery. It is the beginning of the summer in 2004 and Bas has enjoyed a good deal of success and attention while still wallowing in youth.

There are also large transfers of gravestone surfaces that he rubbed on paper during a visit to historic cemeteries in New Orleans. He says he likes the aesthetic of the graves, their history and the fact that they describe the cause of death. Bas, whose parents are both Cuban, is a dark romantic and is drawn to the myth of the artist as martyr - the "tormented soul,' so to speak, who lives fast, produces much and dies young (27 still being the ripe taboo age). While in London for a 2004 group show at the Victoria Miro Gallery, he mentions, the large red buses roaring past him were intimidating, swerving close enough to knock him down.

Death is beautiful - in art. It's a hauntingly perfect concept, the only absolute truth. And it's a notion that's at the basis of Bas' work, something he handles openly and imaginatively, tongue leisurely rested in cheek.

"I've always had this idea that I was gonna die really young," he says, "which is part of why I've moved so quickly in the career, because I was convincedthat I have to get it all out now before I keel over and die accidentally, likegetting hit by a bus or something."

"I have this sort of morbid streak and my whole family has always had a supernatural element, like Cuban superstition. My parents completely believed in ghosts,like they would see them looking over us [children] in the crib and taking careof us, and they were totally OK with it. My little nephew likes to talk to ghosts in the bathroom."


Wallowing in Hype

Miami has ways to go before it can gain enough cred to be a true, respectable metropolis - one that will maintain and splurge significant historical as well as cultural importance; but the word is out on the latter and things are happening. A cultural momentum that may prove to be noteworthy in the long run has been evinced in the local art scene here, which has, since the early '90s, grown swiftly and considerably (from about, say, two dozen galleries to more than 100).

Throughout the year, artists, bohos, musicians, writers, scenesters, hipsters et al. are conglomerating at openings and various art-related events in Wynwood and the Design District, two still-desolate neighborhoods closely eyed by prides of deep-pocketed investors. Big deal art fairs like Art Basel (which came ashore in 2002) have partially vitalized the city and help put it on the art map refrigerator beside the usual tanned-body-sunset magnets, but it's only the local artistic muscle that can foster the power to make this a reputable, resilient and intimidating art destination. A handful or so are at the forefront, with one in particular still soaking up the limelight: 26-year-old Hernan Bas, the slightly coy, young buck star of the Miami "art world."

Purdy Boys

First shown in a group exhibit at the Ambrosino Gallery in North Miami in 1997, Hernan Bas has since been quite prolific (the death-charge seemingly inspires), exhibiting numerous times at Fredric Snitzer's, the Moore Space and NoMi's Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as galleries across the nation (2000's Young Miami at Wooster Projects in New York and 2002's Love in Vein at Sandroni Rey in L.A.) and in the international art world (1999's TRANScontinENTal at Galerie in Montreal and the much feted Miami Nice show at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris in 2004).

He likens his process to writing chapters of a "coming-of-age novel for queers," due to his works' serial nature. It's an oeuvre that does it all over the room and then sneaks outside and down to the lake to ponder the vain and existential in lonesome seclusion: from conjuring silhouettes of pretty boys with Slim Fast fluids and curious drawings based on The Hardy Boys mysteries (with homoerotic undertones, natch) to satanic "bloodwerks" with carved pentagrams and fake blood leaked onto photos of bony fashion models; plus a capricious Moby Dick series of paintings with sea monsters and boys drowning, and a foray into his version of Elysian Fields, where all the martyrs go when they die.

While he's also made installations and mixed-media projects, Bas' paintings of what he calls the "Nouveau Sissies" best define his aesthetic: a figurative mix of the mythical and sexual in dark, gently brooding surroundings, touched with expressionistic insertions of lighter colors such as greens and pinks. Irony surrounds his work, despite its murkier feelings. Bas, who quite fancies the notion of dandyism (he loves his Cameo Pins), is still somewhat self-deprecating and enjoys making light of the humbling, underlying truth that we are all - no exceptions - gonna die.

Mixed receptions to his work abound with the locals. Some see it as decent art, but aren't too impressed, dismissing it as "derivative" (no name dropping here, for sake of avoiding gossip). Hernan also rolls with a certain elite (for sake of a better word) "art crew" in Miami, many of which are New World School of the Arts blood - mostly friends from high school. Magnet school KIDS. Some actually got it, others don't. But Fred Snitzer, one of the kingpin art dealers in Miami and also a professor at New World, has the power to turn dwarfs into fabulous nova fads.

"I don't see his aesthetic as changing anything local," explains Snitzer, founder of his namesake gallery and Bas' dealer, over the telephone. "I don't even think of him as necessarily avant-garde. The lesson learned with artists such as Bas is that we, as a community, must start to take our artists seriously, with or without an outside consensus."

But Hernan is an artist who will most likely matter in the long run, if he can dandily dodge such a sentence. It all depends on his intentions. Up until how, his work - paintings especially - has followed an intimate narrative of identification, an exploration, if you will, of "what it means to be gay" and an affinity for particular things related to homosexuality. Hopefully, he won't simply exploit this concept, and keep his work honest, profound and aesthetically high enough to stand when all the rest becomes a neon-nylon stain for the newer batch to shake their asses upon.

ImAgE

Bas has an aloof, heroin-chic appearance that's in harmony with the boys he paints and, given his penchant for being a "fashionista," his image has become a fairly large part of his career. He even fears turning into what he terms a "post-Warhol sort of celebrity."

"I wish I could say it was all about the work," he says, months later at the studio he shares with fellow artist Naomi Fisher inside the Buena Vista Building in the Design District, the Bas/Fisher Invitational. "I'm also fully aware that a good deal [of my success] is because I look like my work - I'm this skinny, somewhat handsome, waify, Calvin Klein-y boy who can wear Dior and get away with it, you know? But I've even overheard horrible conversations between dealers who are like, 'Oh I really like this artist's work, but he's not attractive.' Period. And that's a reason for them not to represent an artist. It's horrible, but it happens."

"Magazines have, in the past, requested headshots of me to make sure I wasn't butt-ugly before they do a story on me," he adds. "And the photo I sent was this one I shot at the studio across the hall at about four in the morning, drunk off my ass, with a Hershey's kiss silver thing on my head - like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz on crack. Like I'm hhhhhoooot ," he hisses, with imaginary chocolate marbles. "Super ridiculous."

Okay, keep going...

"I don't like being photographed unless I have some sort of control - like I'll be photographed by The Miami Herald and they'll literally want me to pose with, like, a palette and paintbrushes. And I'm like, 'Noooooo !'" he says, falsetto rising for more dramatic self-entertainment. "Like let me wear a beret and a striped black-and-white t-shirt while I'm at it. Lately, I haven't been willing to be photographed if there isn't going to be any reproductions of my work. It's like what the hell is the damn point?"

Just recently at the Moore Space, Bas decided to bedazzle a massive tortoise shell painted in gold. Keep in mind that he's also described himself as an "emo" artist (dammit) who indulges in melodrama and watches the paranormally-inclined soap opera Passions religiously. The tortoise thing came from J.K. Huysmans' Against Nature , the quintessential novel on dandyism, wherein the main character decorates a large live tortoise with jewels to see how it would interact with his Persian rugs and other objects in the surrounding. Of course, it dies.

Excess and fancies lie in us all.

"My version is this sort of altar for the martyr that is the tortoise to decadence," he explains, "the martyr for the Age of Decadence - it died for the cause. The whole nature of dandyism is that the unnatural was more beautiful than the natural - something that was directly the result of the fact that homosexuality was unnatural per se. So you worship the artificial and make it even cooler and more glamorous - like that plastic orchid is hotter than the real one. It's a kind of defective mechanism and I'm still interested in how that functions."

"The whole Age of Decadence thing is still really relevant," he adds. "But excess has basically so little to do with reality. I mean the fact that one, forinstance, has the time to decorate a tortoise just to see how it reacts withthe environment...a lot of Americans take for granted that we're all really decorating our own little tortoises in one way or another."

The Requisite New York Cum Up