HERNAN BAS

This new body of work is set in places of retail where, as comedy, tragedy and life in general tell us, minor characters assume leading dramatic roles. The title, TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen), suggests moments illuminated by theatrical spotlight. Here, then, are actors in the theatre of, usually, suburban commerce poised for an encounter that seems every bit as electric as the hush before a revered thespian enters the stage. This mercantile world takes us to stores and stands of different kinds, as well as to the seaside. Several works were triggered, Proust-like, by childhood memories. Yet it also extends to the hallowed environs of the contemporary art gallery – and here we’re reminded that Bas has often traded in the self-reflexive, conjuring words such as ‘meta’ long before they slipped into common parlance. The title First choice (two artists, a dealer and a collector) sets up a familiar artworld dynamic, only to wrongfoot us with the realisation that the artists depicted in the painting are not the humans.

Elsewhere, Bas deploys (mis)directional cues, skewering expectations while multiple readings and meanings occur – between seller and product, subject and object. Whether we identify with the salesman or as the potential customer, each encounter brings its own dynamic as we negotiate gestures and goods, noticing, say, the wilting flowers and miserly reduction offered by The prodigal son (3pm, farmers market) or weighing up the trade-off between candy and cavities in The tooth fairy.

These moments often point to greater losses – of natural resources in the oceanic plunder depicted in He sells sea shells by the seashore or, more generally, the demise of mall culture and the specialist, one-on-one performance of the salesman. We might recognise the assistant’s froideur in Catching the scent on a sale as being simply of a type, while, for Bas, the often maligned ‘perfume model’ spritzing people as they run the gauntlet from entrance to escalator is ‘a character who will be lost to time, a paperboy with a bottle of Chanel N°5.’ So, there is empathy, sympathy and nostalgia, as well as bright humour, in these works, pointing to a world in which we may well come to lament the dearth of a salesman.

Hernan Bas: TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen) is on view at Perrotin, Tokyo, from 9 September–11 November and Victoria Miro, London, from 17 September–14 November 2026.

Courtesy Victoria Miro.