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Suicide Sunday (Taking on Water)  – 2017

This Hernan Bas painting shows a group of young men aboard a sinking cardboard raft – part of a notoriously drunken river race to celebrate the end of summer exams. It’s a bucolic scene and Bas’s palette is warm. In his depiction of multiple figures, both in and out of the water, all in various stages of undress, he gestures towards Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19). Despite the proximity of their slim bodies, the figures are disconnected; defeat registers in each averted gaze. Bas has focused on male adolescence throughout his career. In these works, the paleness of the boys’ limbs, streaked with tan lines, and their languid movements capture the fragility of emergent masculinities. The theme is developed in a small collection of transfer drawings  in which students are shown at rest in their rooms, drinking or roughly embracing during sport.

Following a period of research while in residence at Jesus College Cambridge in 2016, Hernan Bas has developed new subject matter including the famed ‘Night Climbers of Cambridge’, a group of students whose nocturnal ascents of the ancient buildings of the university and town, taking photographs while trying to avoid detection, gained them a cult following during the early decades of the twentieth century. The notoriety of this thrill-seeking fraternity was cemented when an eponymous book, written under the pseudonym Whipplesnaith, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1937, featuring photographs of members perched atop steeples and squeezed between pillars without climbing ropes and often dressed in dapper evening attire.