‘I paint the kind of people I’m attracted to’: Hernan Bas on hiding from the world in Venice

The Cuban-American artist likes to paint pretty young white men – inspired by his fascination with Holden Caulfield. So why do his portraits have a sinister edge? Hernan Bas has been living in Venice this year, painting tourists. He’s aware of the ironies. (He is the kind of tourist, he tells me, who started looking at Venetian property prices, oh, about a week into his stay.) The Cuban-American artist is from Miami, and he knows about mass tourism all too intimately: he lives in an neighbourhood that has now been so thoroughly colonised by Airbnbs that when he comes home from the airport, taxi drivers ask him where he’s visiting from, and he has to explain that no, this is his own house. Here – his studio looking out over the lulling lap of the lagoon – he can be the tourist as innocent, as amnesiac, drinking in the beauties of the city and forgetting about the violence and catastrophe unfurling beyond. “I can pretend nothing’s happening in the world. And I’ve done a very, very good job of that for the last seven weeks,” he tells me when we meet in the spring. For a moment his mind drifts back despairingly to his home town and the fraught politics of his country.