Pause for a moment and search your memory: the monotonous clatter of escalators, the heavy waft of perfume drifting from department store entrances that slightly stings the throat, and the pale neon light of display windows… With his new exhibition at London’s venerable Victoria Miro, American painter Hernan Bas delivers us into precisely this half-forgotten, faintly nostalgic, and distinctly uncanny atmosphere—the peculiar theater of suburban commerce.
Titled TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen), this new body of work pulls life’s background figures—the side characters we routinely overlook—straight to center stage. Under Bas’s brush, the weary figures inhabiting shopping malls and corner shops are transformed into monumental actors bathed in theatrical spotlights.
Stepping into the exhibition, one is submerged in a distinct commercial melancholy—though far from a tedious experience. On the contrary, we are presented with a cinematic construct that blends childhood memories, Proustian flashbacks, and a subtle vein of dark humor.
The Hypnotic Glow of Lava Lamps and a Vanishing Vocation
We all know those salesclerks stationed at shop entrances, lunging toward passersby with oversized perfume bottles—figures most of us hurriedly side-step to avoid eye contact. Bas pays them a sort of homage. In Catching the scent on a sale, the artist depicts these figures as “lost ragpickers carrying bottled Chanel N°5″—a poignant reflection on an endangered profession and a slowly dying mall culture.
In another canvas, No refunds on relaxation, he teleports us to the idiosyncratic gift shops of the 1990s—the dim interior of a store packed with taxidermy and fossils that Hernan Bas himself spent hours staring at during his childhood. In the background, the mesmerizing yet tacky glow of a classic lava lamp takes over the darkened room, casting strange shadows across the ceiling.
The Cry of the Ocean and the Feline Academy of Fine Arts
There are also striking works that abruptly shift the exhibition’s emotional register. You know that soothing sound of the ocean when you press a seashell to your ear? In He sells sea shells by the sea shore, Hernan Bas subverts this innocent cliché: “That sound you hear isn’t pleasant; it’s the echo of death—the scream of a haunted house into the void.” The vendor’s t-shirt, bearing a reference to the Stephen King novel The Dead Zone, serves as a quiet yet chilling notch marked against the ocean’s growing silence and an unheeded ecological collapse.
Yet not everything is so heavy or dark. One cannot help but smile when Bas’s clever humor comes into play. Standing back from First choice, one observes a quintessential art-world trope: a gallerist, an important collector scrutinizing works, and two artists whose new exhibition is about to open. Stepping closer, however, you realize that the artists featured are not human at all, but two cats. Learning that Bas laid newspapers across his studio floor and spent an entire day painting “like a cat” using paw-shaped rubber stamps to render this fictional gallery—titled Feline Fine Arts—reveals the childlike sincerity embedded in his practice.
A Handful of Candy, a Drooping Flower
Moving through the exhibition, every “salesman” we encounter resembles a deity ruling over their own miniature universe. The confectioner in The tooth fairy becomes a sort of oracle, divining the future through the tooth decay caused by the colorful gumballs he peddles.
Or consider the weary youth at a Mother’s Day market in a church parking lot… In The prodigal son, with a storm brewing overhead and a cigarette dangling precariously from his lips, he attempts to offload wilting flowers at a ten-percent discount. Bas here directly embraces the “melancholic” stance so long attributed to his work, offering an extraordinary, cinematic portrait of apathy.
With TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen), Hernan Bas melds empathy, tragedy, and sharp humor into a single crucible. Following the twilight of face-to-face salesmanship—a reciprocal performance that may soon face total extinction in an increasingly digital world—he leaves us with a quiet ache and a subtle half-smile.
Should you find yourself in London, this colorful yet profoundly deep theater of consumerism can be experienced firsthand on stage at Victoria Miro (London Gallery I) from 17 September to 14 November 2026. (And note: a sister iteration of the exhibition runs concurrently at Perrotin Tokyo from 9 September to 11 November.)
While shopping mall culture hasn’t vanished entirely just yet, isn’t it worth considering what these shop assistants are truly telling us through this lens?
