With over thirty new paintings created within an immersive installation, specially conceived for the museum, Hernan Bas (Miami, 1978) brings The Visitors to Ca' Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna, in the Dom Pérignon Rooms. 

Drawing inspiration from Venice, a city particularly sensitive to tourism, constantly transformed by its consequences and where the artist has completed a residency, Bas has created a new body of work focused on tourists placed in both imagined and real scenarios. Protagonists - predominantly men, white and Western - who inhabit a shifting terrain made of attractions from the "bucket list," historical sites, sacred spaces, ambiguous locales, and sterilized versions of the natural world; highlighting the clichés of tourism, such as the Mona Lisa or the Trevi Fountain, to the destinations of so-called dark tourism, like Chernobyl, Alcatraz, and the Aokigahara forest, places marked by pain that become stops on itineraries; tourist traps that further emphasize the fundamental disconnect between the "visitors" and the worlds they traverse, places designed to deceive, trick, or disappoint.

Bas has long been celebrated for his narrative works permeated with humor, decadence, oddities, occult suggestions, and layered codes. He explores the complexities of personal identity through figures suspended in moments of transformation, where the ordinary slips into the extraordinary. In The Visitors, this sensitivity turns outward. Like the dandies and flâneurs of Bas's previous works, these new figures hover on the thresholds: between curiosity and arrogance, encounter and violation, experience and spectacle. 

Many of these new figures seem to be caught in acts of performance or fiction, while posing, taking photographs, or assuming disguises. One of Bas's tourists claims resident status, another (American) pretends to be Canadian, and another visitor in Thailand stages an encounter with a python. In a typical effect of Bas's sense of irony, a feeling of affection for his clumsy and disoriented visitors clashes with a lucid critique of an era defined by globalization, devoid of stable cultural or geographical references.