Hernan Bas has been living in Venice this year, painting tourists. He is acutely aware of the ironies. (He tells me he started looking at Venetian property prices about a week into his stay.) The Cuban-American artist hails from Miami, a city intimately familiar with mass tourism. His own neighbourhood has been so thoroughly colonised by Airbnbs that when he returns from the airport, taxi drivers ask where he is visiting from, forcing him to explain that this is his home.
From his studio overlooking the lagoon, Bas can play the role of the innocent tourist, amnesiac and drinking in the city’s beauty while forgetting the violence and catastrophe unfolding 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, meeting me in the spring. His mind drifts back despairingly to his hometown and the fraught politics of his country. “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 Body of Work
Bas’s tourists form a body of work to be displayed at Ca’ Pesaro, Venice’s modern art museum. The exhibition comprises 30 paintings, opening alongside the Venice Biennale. He shows me some of them, ranging from bleak to gently satirical. One depicts a grinning young white man at Holi in India, the festival marking winter’s end with bright colours. The subject is smeared in pigments, “my excuse to paint like Willem de Kooning for a day.” Another youth cradles a koala; Bas stumbled upon an entire internet corner devoted to celebrities nursing these marsupials (now outlawed in parts of Australia). His painting is loosely based on an image of Harry Styles. At the darker end, a grinning young man begs on the streets for help to reach Ko Pha-ngan for a full moon party (the Thai island home to the beach of Leonardo DiCaprio and White Lotus fame). Another offers hugs for a tip to support his travels.
The series is titled The Visitors rather than The Tourists, a title that hints at the slightly sinister, uncanny aspect of these works. The young men resemble aliens, as if they have dropped by from outer space.
The Subjects: Young White Men
The figures in the paintings are all young men, specifically young white men. This has been consistent throughout his career. Occasionally a woman appears, but for years he has painted youths in highly wrought fantasy or fictional settings: youths fishing amid a night landscape, crouched amid sunflower fields, or a young man reclining on a couch in the pose of an expiring dandy. Partly, he admits, it is because “I’m gay, and these are the kind of pretty people I would be attracted to.” 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 him is the narrative, the story behind the painting. “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 for me 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 has delved deep into research, sometimes surfacing 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, consisted of somewhat satirical paintings of handsome young men, each an artist with a faintly 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 views his method as akin 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 current series, each painting is accompanied by a little text, sometimes invented by Bas, sometimes spliced from real TripAdvisor reviews culled from the web. “Some of them were too funny not to use,” he says.
A Generous Gesture
Even as he pokes fun at tourist cliches and occasionally expresses disgust, 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, 7 May to 30 August.
