Hernan Bas: Memphis Living, Victoria Miro

At the core of Memphis Living by Hernan Bas are five large paintings of equal size that could be blown-up spreads from a fashion magazine. Each features a modellish young man surrounded by statement architecture, iconic design and lush vegetation. But in the way their backgrounds tend toward abstraction, Bas confuses the viewer and confounds the lifestyle imagery. 

Not a fashion statement then, but a statement about fashion perhaps. There are ghosts in these colourful houses, which accounts for the lost look of their solitary occupants. In one work, Memphis Living (feeling the spirit) (pictured below), the model jumps from his designer chair in fright at the wraith-like gloves which reach for him, while Memphis Living (design panic) features two shadowy figures calling on an anxious youth. 

Yet in what must be the most autobiographical work, Memphis Living (the go to artist) (main picture), we find the spectral gloves painted onto a canvas on a studio wall. So it seems the artist is quite at home with the ghost. Call it the zeitgeist; it’s as if something supernatural accounts for fashion. 

He will draw your attention to the way they sit like jellies in hollows of the skull

"Memphis" here is a historic time and not a place. The design movement of that name really came from Milan, and enjoyed a moment in the Eighties with playful, colourful and impractical furniture and products for the home. Bas, who spent the decade growing up in Florida, came across the distinctive look in TV and film, in Pee-wee Herman or Tim Burton. As he comes to reproduce it in his art, he does so with a sense of theatre.

Indeed the artist has said, in conversation with curator Nancy Spector, that he thinks of all his works as having this quality. “The curtains have just parted on the scene,” he says, “I like to play with that split second when you don’t know what’s going to unravel.” The drama of Memphis Living is claustrophobic, eerie, overwhelming and erotic. We are drawn to the expressions of the solitary cast. We relate to their fixed gaze which carries varying degrees of despair. The candy-coloured designer props are so at odds with their likely fates. They are at odds with any of our fates. 

But lonely as these dramas may be, they are never less than lively. Bas employs a range of painted effects to give his stretched linen backgrounds a collage-like appearance. This is another aspect of Memphis Living, the postmodern tendency to mix and match. So the artist will use acrylic, silkscreen, domestic gloss paint, spray paint. Porous plants contrast with crisp toy-like bricks and mottled stony passages, which one would like to run a hand over. “Everything is surface,” as poet John Ashbery wrote in his postmodern masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

The current show is split between Victoria Miro’s two gallery premises in Islington and Mayfair. The former is roomy enough to let the larger works breathe and light enough those plants to almost photosynthesise. The latter space is more domestic in scale and as such a natural venue for 21 of the artist’s works on paper. Here one gets much closer to the lone subjects of Bas’s artworks. And need it be said that all of them feature young men with a certain look? While the first half of the show was a verdant and complex thrill, this second act runs the risk of overkill. 

The works on paper are for the most part watercolour monotypes, and the most dramatic element of a Bas print is the way he will conjure a facial expression from just a few liquid marks and a freewheeling use of colour. Most remarkable are the eyes. He will ring them with shadow and draw your attention to the way they sit like jellies in hollows of the skull. And while a couple of these works are poppy and political (and featuring badge-wearing gay activists) most retain the gothic flavour of his haunted houses across town. 

The best expression of this is an expressionistic melange of watercolour, acrylic and graphite called Manipulating the Self (#2), where Bas has contorted his arms into an expressionistic tangle of elbows and wrists. Has the artist gone out of his way to look tortured or are his manipulations the only way he can turn out so many of those other portraits we see here? Either way, two more eyes look back at us in this blue-toned painting with something of a Picasso stare about them. 

It should not come as any surprise that gay issues and ghosts co-exist in the work of this painterly storyteller. Bas has also said that: “homosexuality and the supernatural go hand in hand”, which is an intriguing idea, as if suppressed impulses must find an outlet in fantastical forms. And yet the artist’s taste for fantasy goes beyond his sexuality. He reports growing up in a milieu where sightings of UFOs and Sasquatch were fairly routine. His older brother is an occultist. So unless you come from upstate Florida, Bas was never the boy next door.

This exotic background, together with an interest in Decadent literature, makes for a heady atmosphere in which anything can and will “unravel”, as the artist puts it. You can find this sense in both his works on paper, where the spectral gloves make a re-appearance here and there, and of course in his larger works. So this relatively young artist has developed an accomplished world all his own. It will be interesting to see where the spirit takes him next.

• Hernan Bas: Memphis Living at Victoria Miro until 31 May

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