'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.”'
Image: Hernan Bas in his Venice residency studioPhoto: Frederike Helwig
