Hernan Bas: The Visitors

Drawing inspiration from a residency in Venice, Hernan Bas creates a body of work featuring tourists in various imagined and real scenarios. The protagonists—predominantly white, Western, and male—inhabit historic sites, sacred spaces, and sanitised natural environments. Through these figures, the artist explores the disconnection between visitors and the locations they traverse, exposing the absurdity of iconic clichés, dark tourism destinations, and commercial tourist traps.

Celebrated for narrative works permeated by humour and layered codes, Bas examines figures poised at thresholds between curiosity and arrogance, or experience and spectacle. Many subjects are caught in acts of performance, such as posing for photographs or assuming disguises. The project reflects on an era defined by globalisation and a lack of cultural bearings. Venice, a city shaped by exchange yet strained by mass tourism, serves as both a setting and a mirror for these concerns.

The canvases form a continuous visual narrative featuring photographic cropping and saturated surfaces. Slogans, tattoos, and accessories operate as contemporary vanitas, revealing the moral ambiguities of global mobility. Bas captures a generation that is simultaneously searching and self-absorbed, inviting viewers to recognise their own reflections within this suspended world.