Hernan Bas on Fiction, Fantasy, and the Psychology of His Characters

In Venice for “The Visitors,” Hernan Bas reflects on fantasy, storytelling, identity, and the psychologically charged worlds that have shaped his practice.

Ana Novi

August 17, 2026

For more than two decades, Hernan Bas has constructed worlds suspended between seduction and estrangement. Across paintings populated by drifting adolescents, melancholic dandies, occult wanderers, and emotionally unmoored protagonists, the Miami-born artist has developed a visual language in which fantasy, decadence, humour, and unease become tools for examining identity itself. His figures often appear caught at thresholds—between youth and self-knowledge, performance and vulnerability, beauty and disquiet—inhabiting scenes that feel at once cinematic, literary, and psychologically charged.

In “The Visitors,” on view at Ca’ Pesaro—International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice from May 7 through August 30, 2026, Hernan Bas turns that narrative sensibility toward the contemporary figure of the tourist. Created partly during the artist’s residency in Venice, the exhibition brings together more than 30 new paintings in an immersive installation conceived specifically for the museum. Its protagonists—predominantly young Western men—move through bucket-list destinations, sacred spaces, dark tourism sites, staged encounters, and spectacles of consumption, revealing the uneasy boundary between curiosity and entitlement, experience and performance.

The setting is crucial. Venice, a city shaped by centuries of exchange and fantasy, has increasingly become one of the world’s most visible stages for mass tourism and cultural projection. In Hernan Bas’s hands, the visitor becomes both subject and mirror: a figure searching for meaning while remaining strangely detached from the worlds he traverses. Hovering between humor and melancholy, affection and critique, “The Visitors” examines the uneasy territory between spectacle, performance, and contemporary disconnection.

Whitewall spoke with Hernan Bas about tourism as theatre, the emotional architecture of his characters, narrative as a painterly device, and the seductive yet emotionally unstable worlds his characters continue to inhabit.

Hernan Bas on View in Venice

Installation view, “Hernan Bas: The Visitors,” Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice (May 7–August 30, 2026), © Hernan Bas, courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Victoria Miro, photo by Andrea Rossetti.

WHITEWALL: Across your practice, your figures often appear psychologically suspended—caught between fantasy and estrangement, performance and introspection. In “The Visitors,” that ambiguity becomes attached specifically to the figure of the tourist. What drew you toward tourism as a lens through which to think about contemporary identity and emotional dislocation?

HERNAN BAS: I realized I’d been taking the viewer on ‘trips’ of a sort for a while now, with my interest in odd locations or peculiar destinations bleed into the work well before I decided to turn the lens directly on the figure of the “tourist.” It felt natural to focus on the kinds of characters that might populate these locales more directly. Dislocation in the individuals tends to get heightened when they themselves are ‘dislocated’ from their lives while on holiday.

WW: Venice feels inseparable from the conceptual structure of this exhibition. It is simultaneously a city of beauty, spectacle, fragility, and consumption. How did living and working in Venice shape your thinking around the series, and what interested you about the city as both a lived reality and a global projection of fantasy?

HB: This series really came to the top of my mind directly because of I knowing it would debut in Venice. Venice is one of my favorite places on Earth, and I feel a kinship with the residents, as I can relate to living in a city revolving around tourism. My daily walk to my studio in Miami takes me through the main strip of “Calle 8,” which is the St. Mark’s Square of Little Havana. Living in Venice, I was hyperaware of the annoyances of tourists, but despite my perceived kinship, I was also a “visitor,” along with everyone else.

WW: Many of the figures in these paintings seem to exist in states of performance or self-invention—posing, disguising themselves, or carefully constructing experiences. What interested you about tourism as a form of theatre within a culture increasingly shaped by visibility and image production?

HB: One of the things that stuck with me is that all tourism is a form of performance, especially when it comes to documenting your trip. You never see a picture of your mom dragging her luggage over multiple bridges in Venice or a photo of you screaming at your children when they fail to find interest in visiting a famous church. Social media has encouraged a ‘filter’ that makes people act increasingly dumb and reckless; incidents of ‘tourists behaving badly’ have become nearly daily news stories around the globe.

WW: There is a fascinating tension in the works between satire and empathy. At times the paintings expose absurdity, privilege, or cultural detachment, yet they never feel entirely cynical. How do you navigate that territory between critique and affection when constructing these characters?

HB: This series was particularly tricky; it might be the first time I’ve painted characters that I might not want to have a drink with. I have little sympathy for the so-called ‘beg-packers,’ for example. Yet I hope humour is the main takeaway from the works. I think there’s a fair mix of tourists behaving badly and others who are on a more sincere voyage. A man hoping to hitch a ride on a UFO in Nevada or a gentleman trying to blend in with the crabs migrating on Christmas Island—now those are the kind of people I’d like to share a toast with.

The Role of Narrative in a Hernan Bas Painting

WW: Narrative has always played a central role within your practice, and you’ve described yourself as “a conceptual artist who just happens to paint.” These works feel almost cinematic in the way they imply emotional worlds beyond the frame. How do storytelling and fictional construction function within your process?

HB: It’s the most important thing to me, storytelling that is. I must start with a precise narrative, something I can ruminate on for the entire process of constructing a picture. I’ve borrowed from literature in the past, but over the last decade or more I’ve stuck to my own inventions apart from the occasional “quiet history painting” I make that relates to overlooked odd moments from the past. The installation, showing the works butted up against each other in grids, was to me a version of a storyboard or your feed on Instagram…

“It’s the most important thing to me, storytelling that is,”
—Hernan Bas

WW: Your paintings are visually lush and seductive, yet beneath the surface one senses loneliness, melancholy, and existential drift. How conscious are you of using beauty and attraction as an entry point into more psychologically uneasy territory?

HB: Tourists feel like they can get away with anything. Attractive people have a similar blind way of getting through the day. Put the two together and you have an untamed beast that can tromp through Chernobyl or Japan’s Suicide Forest without batting a lash. The arrogance of asking for a fork at a sushi restaurant is countered by the confidence of the character’s looks. I leave it to the audience to decide what it is they are really looking at.

WW: Your work often moves between historical painting traditions and the visual language of contemporary culture—Symbolism, decadence, fashion imagery, internet aesthetics, and theatrical staging. How do you think about the relationship between painting and spectatorship today, particularly in a moment when images are consumed so rapidly?

HB: All I can do is strive to make an image that is somewhat timeless and relatable to contemporary audiences, as well as future onlookers. Figurative work comes in and out of fashion, but it never goes away, simply because people want to relate to an image. If you look on social media, it’s plain to see that images with people get a lot more likes than do landscapes. When is the last time you saw a celebrity post a still life?

“I hope, apart from a smile or two and a laugh, there’s a bit of introspection when you leave the galleries,”
—Hernan Bas

WW: Throughout the exhibition, your figures move through landscapes, monuments, and spectacles, yet they rarely seem fully present within them. In many ways, “The Visitors” feels less like an exhibition about tourism than about the emotional condition of contemporary life itself. Looking back at the body of work now, what do you feel these figures reveal about the world we are currently moving through?

HB: Thank you! I agree, tourism was the framework, but I hope people see it more broadly. You must be a ‘visitor’ to see the ‘visitors’ in Venice. I hope, apart from a smile or two and a laugh, there’s a bit of introspection when you leave the galleries. We are looking for ‘something’ that’s missing from our day-to-day lives; some seek it through travel, others online or through religion. I’m not immune to this either; I’m not someone who can sit in silence. I spend hours a day working alone in the studio, but I have a television playing in the background all the time. It takes me away, lets my mind wander, and occasionally I hear a bit of a ‘something’ I’ve missed, and then maybe I make a painting about it.