In Venice, Hernan Bas Paints the Problem with Modern Tourism

A handsome, skinny white boy in his late teens or early 20s peruses a narwhal’s tusk in a museum vitrine while chewing on a toothpick. Another, in a suit and tie, with a pair of binoculars around his neck, sits in an empty strip joint, having tossed a few crumpled dollar bills at the foot of the stripper pole. There is a boy grinning maniacally as he holds a koala bear, and another—who is wearing a Smiths meat is murder T-shirt—attacking an enormous boat-shaped plate of sushi with a fork. There’s a boy at Chernobyl, and another in Japan’s “suicide forest”; one with a sign asking for money to get him to a full moon party at Koh Phangan, and another wearing a stained T-shirt, on which he has written: the hugs are free, but if you want to help us you can donate. These last two paintings depict an obnoxious phenomenon known as “begpacking,” in which Western tourists demand money to fund their travels next to genuinely disadvantaged local beggars in the countries they are visiting.

There are 40 pictures in all, and together they make up an exhibition that the American artist Hernan Bas has been preparing for a year in collaboration with Victoria Miro, Lehmann Maupin, and Perrotin galleries. Some of the works were completed during an artists residency in Venice, where the show will open in May at the Ca’ Pesaro–International Gallery of Modern Art, to coincide with the Biennale. When I meet Bas on a misty February morning at the studio where he’s spending his residency, which overlooks the Giudecca Canal, the 48-year-old is putting the finishing touches on a picture of a bleary-eyed boy wearing a T-shirt with the slogan They say I was in Amsterdam, but I can’t remember.

“I had fun with the T-shirts,” the artist says, explaining that he loves to paint the details of his subjects’ clothes. Today he is wearing an Acne Studios cap and his favorite old top—a stripy Margiela knit with a hole under the armpit that he calls his “Freddy Krueger sweater.” A TV plays with the sound down. It’s one of Bas’s few diversions as he paints alone, with no assistants, for long hours, six days a week. Sometimes a show about something weird—perhaps a paranormal phenomenon—will inspire him.

Bas had already started painting boys in foreign scenarios when he was invited to mount an exhibition in Venice, a city that is swamped with tourists like no other. He decided to call the show “The Visitors.” “I thought ‘visitors’ sounded more nefarious than ‘tourists,’ ” he says. “More like UFOs landing, as opposed to your mom in a backpack.” The pictures will be hung closely together in two rooms with a view of Venice’s Grand Canal; they depict a succession of spoiled white male American tourists doing objectionable things around the world in pursuit of leisure, bragging rights, and social media content. “It’s a kind of tourism that isn’t really connected to the place they visit,” Elisabetta Barisoni, Ca’ Pesaro’s director and the curator of the show, says with some understatement. “It shows that sometimes traveling is not related to knowledge.”

At a time when America’s presence can feel increasingly oppressive to many in the rest of the world, the show seems particularly relevant—though Bas has little interest in chasing the zeitgeist. “I did a painting of a guy doing an audio tour of Alcatraz, and the same week people were talking about ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ ” he says, referring to the notorious immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades. “Then I did one of Area 51, and two weeks later Netflix put out a documentary about people who were going to storm it.” He depicted a boy with the creepy dolls that populate Mexico’s Isla de las Muñecas, only to see Lady Gaga then make a video in the same place. However, he missed the Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez—perhaps the ultimate example of imperious American tourism, given that it seemed to use the city’s residents and culture as little more than a backdrop to a billionaire’s nuptials. “That must have been a shitshow,” Bas muses.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to describe “The Visitors” as straightforward satire. Over the course of his career, Bas has painted skinny young men almost exclusively—some of his first pictures were even painted using SlimFast, the food substitute intended to aid weight loss, as pigment. Back in the early ’00s, he was deeply inspired by Hedi Slimane’s designs for Dior Homme—slender tailoring for hollow-cheeked indie kids. “As a young artist, you sort of paint what you are,” Bas says. “When I was growing up in Miami, the ideal of beauty was the Bruce Weber swimsuit model. So when Hedi happened, I was like, Oh, that’s me. You get excited when you see yourself presented in culture.”

Bas grumbles that people are always curious as to why he paints only white boys. “I’m not making work about white guys,” he says. “To me, I’m just casting characters. I say they’re all Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. People ask me why I don’t paint Black figures, and I just don’t think it’s my place. I find it strange when a white artist paints Black bodies. There are some who do it, and it’s almost like fetishizing, in a way.”

So why are the guys always handsome? “Do you really want to look at a painting of a street urchin?” Bas asks. He says that although he’ll sometimes paint friends’ features on his figures, he usually goes to male models on Pinterest for facial inspiration; they all wear smoldering expressions. Bas adds that good-looking people tend to get away with a lot more in life, an idea that he plays with in his work. “People are more forgiving. It’s like, Oh, look at this handsome young man doing something so terrible. He’s carving into the Colosseum, but he’s hot.” As for the lack of women in his work, “it’s probably the straight-up fact that I’m gay,” Bas says. “It’s as easy as that. I mean, Picasso didn’t paint a whole lot of men.”

Bas is the third of six children. His parents left Cuba in the early ’60s, after Fidel Castro came to power; Bas was born in Miami, and a few months later the family moved upstate to a spot that was remote and rural, “literally on a dirt road.” The area’s other inhabitants included zoo animals that had escaped when a train carrying them derailed. “I remember my sister riding on a giant tortoise in the yard because it just wandered over,” he says. One Fourth of July, he and his sister were stalked by a panther while walking back from their neighbor’s house. The animal fled only when Bas’s mother appeared on the porch. “It sounds like a made-up horror movie, but it really happened,” he says.

As Bas tells it, the area was also a hot spot for paranormal activity. His father was matter-of-fact about seeing UFOs—Bas has a memory of him sitting with a gun in their living room, “which was covered in dazzling red, blue, and green lights” because an alien spacecraft was parked outside. The artist also remembers looking out of his window as a child while lying in bed and seeing the hairy face of a Yeti-like creature peering in, upside down—meaning that it must have been crouching on the roof. It’s no wonder that his paintings often have a macabre component. Bas’s decadent stew of influences ranges from Edgar Allan Poe, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustav Klimt to the Choose Your Own Adventure books he loved as a child, in which the reader has to decide where the protagonist goes next on his quest.

Bas declared that he wanted to be an artist when he was 4—his parents have recordings of him at that age talking about it—and they were supportive. His father had been in a successful Cuban-American orchestra in Miami called Los Jovenes del Hierro, which translates to the Youths of Steel, a name that Bas says he will one day appropriate for his retrospective. He went to art-focused middle and high schools—“like regular high school, but instead of leaving at the end of the day, you spend another three hours doing art courses.” Things went awry in college, at Cooper Union in New York City; Bas got thrown out after one semester for not turning up to classes. By that point, he explains, “I was so sick of art school.” Feeling adrift, he went back to Miami and, in 1998, got a job as an art handler and tour guide at the Rubell Family Collection, the museum that had been set up in a former drug and weapons confiscation center by the art collectors Don and Mera Rubell. “He was always in the library, a young person obsessed with looking at art,” Mera Rubell remembers. “Without us realizing it, he was our first artist in residence.”

Bas says that the Rubells were the only people who came to his first show, in 1998, at a community college gallery space in Miami. “They took me to lunch because I think they felt bad.” But over the next couple years, he found other young artists in the city, and they started doing group shows together. He was taken on by the Miami gallery Fredric Snitzer in 2000. “I couldn’t drink at my own opening because I wasn’t 21 yet,” he remembers. “I’ve been showing for a long time.”

He also benefited from Art Basel, which had its first fair in Miami in 2002. Bas’s gallery was the only local dealer to have a booth, and his work sold. Since then, he says, “it’s been a slow build—there was never a moment when I was the It boy.”

The Rubells were hugely impressed with a 2002 show he did at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami of “very tender” drawings of Boy Scouts, which were displayed inside a log cabin and had to be viewed with flashlights. “You felt like this artist was letting you into a very private space, revealing his experience in his life as a gay man who didn’t fit the profile of the prevalent American masculinity,” Mera Rubell says. The couple bought the whole show (they now own around 50 of Bas’s works) and later introduced the artist to Glenn Scott Wright from Victoria Miro, the gallery that would add Bas to its roster in 2003. Since then, Bas has done a variety of intriguing shows. “The Conceptualists,” from 2022, depicted imaginary conceptual artists: One “mixes his paints exclusively with water from Niagara Falls”; another, “by combining different grave rubbings, invents lives that never existed.” Earlier shows riffed on the Bloomsbury Group and the Bright Young Things, the writers, philosophers, and socialites who sought to reinvent British society after World War I.

Bas says that he can’t help but refer to art history when he paints. “Any artist who thinks they’re making something that has nothing to do with what’s happened before is fooling themselves or delirious,” he says. “The moment you pick up that brush, centuries of history are in your hand.” Mera Rubell admires the way Bas is able to combine different eras, like his 2004 painting of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, which imagines the Swan King as an aughts twink. “He layers contemporary insecurities about the body and puts them into historical settings. It’s quite magical,” she says.

Venice will mark the apotheosis of an artist who has stealthily cruised to the forefront of the art world. “I am an A-list artist who gets the C- or D-list slots,” he says, smiling. “People like the work, but I get the small room. I get to do the residency, but during the time that no one else wants. I have that lucky career where I’ve gotten all the opportunities, but always just off to the side.”

His next show will continue to explore the theme of problematic youth—he was going to call it “Red Flags” but ended up with “Hostile Youth” as the title. It’s all part of Bas’s ongoing quest to manifest the images that come to him. He’s been thinking of young American tourists who ostentatiously pretend they’re Canadian, for instance. But some are more enigmatic. “I’ve had this image in my brain for the last couple of months,” he says, “of a guy in a dazzling pink suit sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons with tons of bread around him.”

Grooming by Danilo Ferrigno for Davines Italia at W-MManagement; Retouching: Art Post. Artworks: © Hernan Bas, Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin, and Victoria Miro.