The Hallucinations of Poets (painted forest)
2010
A dense forest scene rendered in mixed media combines acrylic, airbrush, and block print techniques on paper to create a visually layered composition. Two figures in muted clothing navigate through weathered white tree trunks and pale undergrowth, while additional silhouetted figures populate the shadowed woodland depths. The work balances naturalistic representation with abstract gestural marks, particularly in the vibrantly colored striations that activate the pale ground, suggesting psychological or fantastical undercurrents within the seemingly ordinary forest setting. Bas employs the forest as a site of ambiguity where figuration and abstraction, clarity and obscurity, coexist in productive tension. The painting demonstrates the artist's characteristic engagement with queer subcultural spaces and psychological interiors rendered through landscape.
- Medium
- Acrylic, airbrush and block print on paper
- Overall
- Spotted At
- Gallery · Victoria Miro Gallery
Notes
Victoria Miro, Frieze New York 2026, Booth A07, May 13–17, 2026.
For Sale — $150000
Artists in conversation
Dana Schutz
American · b. 1976
Schutz shares Bas's dense layering of figuration within psychologically charged environments, combining gestural acrylic marks with narrative ambiguity where figures are caught in uncertain, psychologically loaded scenarios rendered in mixed painterly registers.
Allison Gildersleeve
American · b. 1977
Gildersleeve works with pale, muted grounds activated by vibrant gestural striations and abstract marks that hover between representation and abstraction, closely mirroring the formal tension in Bas's forest scene between naturalistic imagery and energetic abstract patterning on paper.
Jules de Balincourt
American · b. 1972
De Balincourt consistently places silhouetted and partially legible figures within landscape environments charged with subcultural narrative tension and psychological unease, using layered mixed media techniques that similarly blur the boundary between documentary woodland observation and symbolic psychological landscape.
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