Hernan Bas transforms contemporary tourism into pictorial matter and critical reflection with The Visitors, the new exhibition project conceived for Ca' Pesaro, the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice. Inspired by Venice, a city that symbolizes the contradictions generated by global tourism and where the artist held a creative residency, Bas builds a new body of work dedicated to the figure of the contemporary visitor, caught between the desire for discovery, the consumption of experience, and the loss of authenticity. The exhibition focuses on tourists, predominantly Western men, portrayed in real and imagined settings, ranging from the great symbols of international tourism to places associated with the so-called dark tourismAlongside iconic destinations like the Mona Lisa or the Trevi Fountain, scenes permeated by pain and memory emerge, such as Chernobyl, Alcatraz, or the Aokigahara forest, also transformed into stops on globalized itineraries. Through these environments, Bas stages the distance that often exists between visitors and the places they visit, highlighting mechanisms of cultural consumption, stereotypes, and dynamics of spectacularization.
The Visitors, like the dandies and the flâneurs
Always recognized for his narrative painting permeated by irony, ambiguity, symbolic references and atmospheres suspended between reality and fiction, Bas here shifts his gaze from individual interiority to the collective dynamics of the present. The figures of The Visitors, like the dandies and flâneurs featured in his previous works, inhabit borderlands: between curiosity and invasion, observation and appropriation, authentic experience and image construction. Many characters seem engaged in a continuous mise-en-scène: they pose for photographs, assume different identities, transform the journey into a performance. One tourist claims a status that doesn't belong to him, another hides his origins, while a visitor to Thailand artificially constructs an exotic encounter with a python. Episodes that reflect, with the artist's customary irony, a contemporary world marked by globalization and increasingly fluid identities, detached from stable geographical or cultural references. Some of the works are born directly from Bas's experience in Venice. During his stay in the lagoon, the artist worked closely with the city's light, its pictorial tradition, and above all its complex relationship with mass tourism. Venice thus becomes not only a setting, but a metaphor for the tensions addressed by the project: a city historically built on exchange and today profoundly affected by the effects of global tourism.
This reflection is also intertwined with the artist's personal biography, which he grew up in Miami and was profoundly influenced by his experience as a first-generation Cuban-American, often experienced through a suspended sense of belonging, almost like a "visitor" within his own place of origin. The works, arranged in an immersive and continuous path, construct a visual narrative where seemingly secondary details—slogans, tattoos, accessories, saturated color surfaces—take on the value of a contemporary vanitas, revealing the moral contradictions of global mobility. Bas portrays a generation torn between the search for meaning and narcissism, between the desire for experience and the inability to truly inhabit the places they pass through.
Biography of Hernan Bas
Hernan Bas (born Miami, Florida, 1978) lives and works in Miami. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2023); Hernan Bas: Choose Your Own Adventure, Space K, Seoul; Yuz Museum, West Bund, Shanghai (2021–22); Hernan Bas, Rubell Museum, Miami (2020–22); Hernan Bas: A Brief Intermission, CAC Málaga, Spain (2018); and Florida Living, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2017). Bas’s work was also featured in The Collectors, a project conceived by Elmgreen & Dragset for the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2009). His works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), Detroit Institute of Arts, Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Museum of Modern Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), among others.
As Elisabetta Barisoni, director of Ca' Pesaro and curator of the exhibition, points out, the characters populating the rooms initially seem to represent a youth engaged in exploring the world, only to later reveal paradoxical, absurd, and profoundly ironic dimensions. Bas's large canvases depict an everyday reality often invisible in its normality: a gullible and voyeuristic tourism, sometimes capable of transcending the limits of respect and memory. In images reminiscent of souvenir photographs or contemporary keepsakes, history and reality seem to progressively fracture, allowing all the ambiguities of our time to emerge.
