Cuban-American artist Hernan Bas has been living in Venice this year, painting tourists. He is acutely aware of the ironies. He is the kind of tourist, he admits, who started looking at Venetian property prices about a week into his stay. Originally from Miami, Bas knows mass tourism intimately: his neighborhood has been so thoroughly colonized by Airbnbs that taxi drivers ask him where he is visiting from when he returns from the airport, and he has to explain that it is his own house.
Escaping Reality in Venice
From his studio overlooking the lagoon, Bas can play the innocent tourist, drinking in the city's beauty and forgetting the violence and catastrophe beyond. 'I can pretend nothing's happening in the world. And I've done a very, very good job of that for the last seven weeks,' he says. Yet his mind drifts back to his hometown and America's fraught politics. 'It was so mind boggling how much the Latin community went for Trump, and now everyone is eating dirt because they're hiding from ICE,' he remarks. 'Those same people who were gung ho for Trump are now getting deported.'
The Visitors: A New Series
Bas's tourist paintings form a body of work titled The Visitors, which will be exhibited at Ca' Pesaro, Venice's modern art museum, alongside the Venice Biennale. The 30 paintings range from bleak to gently satirical. One features a grinning young white man at Holi in India, smeared in pigments—'my excuse to paint like Willem de Kooning for a day,' Bas says. Another shows a youth cradling a koala, inspired by an internet corner devoted to celebrities nursing marsupials, loosely based on an image of Harry Styles. Darker works include a grinning young man begging for help to get to Ko Pha-ngan for a full moon party, and another offering hugs for tips to support his travels. The title The Visitors hints at the sinister, uncanny aspect: the young men appear like aliens who might have dropped by from outer space.
Recurring Themes and Inspirations
The figures in Bas's paintings are almost always young white men. Occasionally a woman appears, but for years he has painted youths in fantasy or fictional settings—fishing amid night landscapes, crouched in sunflower fields, or reclining like an expiring dandy. Bas admits part of it is because 'I'm gay, and these are the kind of pretty people I would be attracted to.' He adds, 'They are all just Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye to me: it's the cliche of the youth who doesn't know where he is in life. I've basically been painting that character for my entire career.'
What truly attracts Bas is the narrative. 'People make fun of me for saying it, but I always feel like everything I do is an attempt at being a conceptual artist who just happens to paint. The idea, the scenario is the hardest thing to come up with. I could just paint pretty boys all day and get away with it at this point in my career, but that doesn't interest me at all. Something has to be in the painting: some kind of narrative.'
Research and Storytelling
For each tourist painting, Bas dives deep into research, sometimes aghast at human folly. 'I love storytelling,' he says. 'I thought I wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to be a painter at certain points in my life. When I sit around with these characters I have to make entire backstories about their lives that no one will ever know about, that only exist in my brain.'
Another recent series, The Conceptualists, featured satirical paintings of handsome young men, each an artist with a ridiculous practice. 'I invented the stories of these different characters from scratch, as well as the entire body of work of each of them.' He compares his method to 'stagecraft,' creating a small compressed drama where 'you're building a play-set, and you have to be able to describe the entire play within one glance.' For The Visitors, each painting is accompanied by a little text—sometimes invented, sometimes spliced from real TripAdvisor reviews. 'Some of them were too funny not to use,' he says.
A Generous Gesture
Despite poking fun at tourist cliches and expressing disgust at times, Bas remains generous. In Ca' Pesaro, his work will be installed in a room overlooking the Grand Canal, where two large windows usually concealed by curtains offer a wonderful view of the water. He has asked for the curtains to be drawn back during his show. 'I want people to really have that tourist moment,' he says, 'even if it means ignoring what I put 10 months of my life into. The show is in Venice for a reason.'
Hernan Bas: The Visitors is at Ca' Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, from 7 May to 30 August.
