‘I paint the kind of people I’m attracted to’: Hernan Bas hides from the world in Venice | Art and design

Hernan Bas has been living in Venice this year, photographing tourists. He knows the paradoxes. (He’s the kind of tourist, he tells me, who started looking at Venetian property prices, oh, about a week into his stay.) A Cuban-American artist is coming back. Miamiand he knows a lot about mass tourism: he lives in an area that is now dominated by Airbnbs so that when he comes home from the airport, taxi drivers ask him where he’s from, and he has to explain that no, this is his house.

Here – his studio overlooking the beach – can be innocent tourists, like amnesiac, drink the beauty of the city and forget the violence and dangers that are happening beyond. “I can’t imagine that nothing is happening in the world.” And I’ve done a really good job for the last seven weeks,” he tells me when we meet in the spring. For a moment his mind wanders back to his hometown and his country’s politics. “It was amazing that Latinos took to Trump, and now everyone is eating dirt because they’re hiding from ICE,” he says. “The same people who wanted Trump are now being deported.”

Bas guests form a group of works that will be seen at Ca’ Pesaro, the modern museum in the city: an exhibition of 30 paintings that will be opened alongside the Venice Biennale. He shows me some of them – in terms ranging from dark to mild. Here is a white man who is crying Holi in India, the festival that ends at the end of winter is a festival of bright colors – he paints, “my excuse to paint like Willem de Kooning for a day”. Here’s another young man carrying a koala: Bas stumbled upon an entire corner of the Internet dedicated to celebrities who breastfeed these marsupials (case in point. prohibited in some parts of Australia). His drawing is based on a photo he found of Harry Styles. At the end of the darkness there is a smiling young man begging on the streets for help to get to Ko Pha-ngan for a full moon party (the Thai island and beach of Leonardo DiCaprio and White Lotus fame). Another has a boy who is hugging her to give her money to pay for her travels. The series is called not Strangers but Strangers – a title that is a bit sinister, ironic for some of these works. The boys are like strangers; they probably came through from space.

The figures in all the paintings are boys – white boys. It has been the same throughout his career. Sometimes a woman intervenes, but for many years he has been photographing young people in fantasy or fantasy settings: young people fishing in night spots; or kneeling in the middle of a field of sunflowers, a young man leaning on a sofa in the shape of a dark grape. Part of that is, he admits, because “I’m gay, and these are the kind of attractive people I’m attracted to. They’re both Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye to me: it’s the behavior of young people who don’t know where they are in life.

It’s the story, the art story that appeals to him the most, he says. “People laugh at me for saying it, but I always feel like all I do is try to be an artist who just paints.” The idea, the scene is too difficult for me to describe. I could just draw cute guys all day and stop at this point in my career, but that doesn’t make me happy at all. Something must be in some art: “

In every picture of the visitors to the site, he has gone under the rabbit survey, and is sometimes surprised by the stupidity of the people he has discovered. “I like to tell stories,” he says. “I thought I wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to be an artist for other aspects of my life. When I’m with these people I have to create all the aspects of their lives that no one knows about, that exist in my brain.”

Another recent series, called The Conceptualiststhere were funny pictures of cute boys, and everyone was an artist doing silly things. “I created stories about these different people from the beginning, and the entire career of each of them.” He thinks of his way of working as “stagecraft”, making a small play where “you are making a play, and you have to describe the whole play in one look.” In the current series, each drawing is accompanied by a small text – sometimes created by Bas, sometimes compiled from, for example, real TripAdvisor reviews taken from the Internet. “Some of them were too funny to use,” he says.

However, even though he makes fun of the tourist spots – and shows some disgust, at times – he is still a generous man. At Ca’ Pesaro, his work will be installed in a room overlooking the Grand Canal, where two large windows, often hidden by curtains, offer a clear view of the water. But when his show started, he asked for the curtains to be put back. He said: “I want people to really have time to visit, even if it means ignoring what I put 10 months of my life into. This exhibition is in Venice for a reason.”

• Hernan Bas: Visitors at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, 7 May to 30 August