In Venice, it's the tourists who have caught Hernan Bas' eye

'Too many tourists' reads a scrawl of lipstick-red graffiti on the roller shutters of a shop in Venice’s Rialto district. It is a growing sentiment across global travel hotspots, sparking protests and government-enforced restrictions everywhere from Barcelona to Kyoto. For the 61st Venice Biennale, that tension is addressed at Ca’ Pesaro, where Hernan Bas presents The Visitors, one of Wallpaper’s must-see exhibitions during this year’s festival.

Spanning 40 paintings – some of which were created while the artist was in residence in the city – Bas depicts tourists in both real and imagined scenarios as they navigate bucket-list attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, seedy entertainment venues and sanitised examples of the natural world. 'I’ve been thinking about this series for a while,' Bas noted at the opening of the exhibition. 'But when I found out I was able to work in this city, it was the perfect opportunity. There’s no better example than Venice for overtourism.'

As a native Miamian, Bas is no stranger to the friction tourism can bring into local communities. Though while it is easy to cast the tourist as a villain, his work resists any over-simplified delineation. His characters - notably all white males - are presented along a spectrum: variously sympathetic and naive, but also smug, entitled, and disengaged. 'It's a mix of people behaving badly, but also some of them, I think, are just sweet individuals,' Bas explained. In one a young man fingers the cheeses of a market stall, flagrantly defying the ‘do not touch’ sign; in another, a midday visitor to a strip club is made all the more disturbing by the pair of binoculars hung around his neck. Other characters are shown innocently indulging their niche interests; a timid-looking boy visiting the crab migration on Christmas Island, say, or a sci-fi fan who’s made the pilgrimage to Little A'Le'Inn in Area 51.

Formally, Bas is a master of surface with a gift for rendering the peculiar, plastic shimmer of a cheap souvenir. His use of photographic cropping, highly saturated colours and dense arrangement recalls the sensory overwhelm of an Instagram feed. But here we are offered a glimpse beyond the highlight reel. 'Online, you only see the best examples of people on vacation. You don’t see the photo of a mom yelling at their son, dragging their suitcase through Venice. No one takes a picture of that.'

Still, there is something performative about Bas’ Visitors that reveals how travel has changed our age of technology. In Alone with Lisa (the Louve, Paris), a fresh-faced boy stands in front of the Mona Lisa, his presence eclipsing the much larger masterpiece hanging directly behind it. 'I always loved that at the Louvre, the biggest painting is behind the Mona Lisa and no one ever looks at it, because they're all there to see the Mona Lisa, or to photograph themselves with the Mona Lisa,' Bas continues, 'There's plenty more photos of people with the Mona Lisa than there is of the actual Mona Lisa.'

The Visitors probe what’s behind the impulse to document ourselves next to these significant objects and landmarks, circling the point where searching slips into self absorption. They highlight how the motivation behind our travels has shifted, moving away from a Grand Tour-eque pursuit of knowledge to a pursuit of social capital. Confident in Kyoto is one such example. In it, a smug-faced boy eats sushi with a fork, a practice generally perceived as disrespectful across Asia. Bas deftly weaves an additional layer of irony into the scene by painting him in a The Smiths Meat is Murder t-shirt, exposing his flimsy, performative ethics. Why bother crossing oceans only to ensure your home comforts and customs remain entirely unperturbed by the reality of the destination, it seems to ask. In his Baudrillardian staging, the world becomes a collection of backdrops rather than a place to be inhabited and engaged with.

The exhibition further probes this voyeurism by turning its gaze toward the industrial machinery of the souvenir. Through Bas’s lens, these trinkets raise uncomfortable questions about their hidden costs. Who pays for the mass-produced ‘Hawaiian’ shirt or the captive animal encounter? Is it the local artisan priced out of their district, the worker on a distant production line, or nature itself? The authenticity of these experiences is treated with equal suspicion. In Feasting off Infamy (Vlad Dracul House, Romania), a visitor stands before the supposed birthplace of Vlad the Impaler - now a quintessential tourist trap pedalling cheap capes and mugs. 'You can go and meet Dracula in his room,' Bas noted, 'but you have to pay extra to get a selfie with him.'

The Visitors hold up a mirror to the 21st-century traveller. As Elisabetta Barisoni, director of the Ca’ Pesaro, aptly notes in the exhibition catalogue: 'In these works, which at first glance appear to be souvenir photos or mementos of exotic travels, the fragility of the values of history and memory is revealed, and our sense of reality is shaken.' Stepping back into the labyrinthine streets of Venice, Bas’ satire loses distance. You realise with a prickle of unease that the ‘visitors’ are not just the characters adorning Ca’Pesaro’s walls, but all of us.

Held at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice Dom Pérignon Galleries, from 7 May – 30 August 2026