The history of Western art is deeply marked by images of violence. Paintings conceived to glorify military victories, depict religious martyrdoms, legitimize conquests, or transform suffering into an aesthetic experience have shaped, for centuries, much of our collective visual memory. Within them, violence appears not only as documentation or narrative, but also as a cultural language, a symbolic construction, and a mechanism of power. Artemio’s series Blood stems precisely from this tradition in order to carry out an extreme reduction, eliminating the scene and preserving only its trace.

Presented for the first time in Europe at SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer, the exhibition brings together a selection of works belonging to one of the artist’s most powerful projects developed in recent years, shown until now exclusively in Mexican institutions. Artemio takes some of the most brutal representations in Western painting, by artists such as Francisco de Goya, Otto Dix, J. M. W. Turner, and Ilya Repin, and subjects them to a process of radical emptying. Bodies disappear, as do heroic gestures, composition, theatricality, and narrative. Only the blood remains.

The operation is as simple as it is profoundly unsettling. Where painting had historically constructed devices of visual fascination around pain, Artemio introduces an interruption. His white surfaces function as spaces of suspension in which the image seems to have collapsed, leaving behind only scattered remnants, minimal stains oscillating between abstraction, forensic evidence, and disappearance. Yet, far from emptying meaning, this absence activates the viewer’s memory. We recognize the images even when they are practically no longer there. It is precisely within this recognition that the true political dimension of the series emerges.

Contemporary violence now circulates at an unprecedented speed and scale. Images of war, extermination, forced migration, or destruction form part of the everyday flow of information and visual consumption. In this context, Blood does not propose an explicit representation of horror, but rather a reflection on the cultural mechanisms that shape our relationship with it. Artemio shifts the gaze from the event itself toward its symbolic residues, questioning the way images construct sensitivity, normalize certain forms of violence, and participate in the configuration of collective memory.

There is also a particularly incisive dimension in the artist’s gesture: a deliberate renunciation of spectacle. Faced with a visual culture saturated with stimuli, Artemio works through restraint and silence. Blood ceases here to be a dramatic element and becomes structure, a persistent sign, an irreducible remainder of that which the image can no longer contain. His works do not seek to illustrate violence, but rather to point toward the impossibility of fully separating ourselves from it, even when it disappears from view.

In Blood, painting ceases to function as representation and instead operates as vestige. What we contemplate are not historical scenes, but the marks those scenes have left upon our cultural consciousness. Artemio thus dismantles some of the fundamental mechanisms of the Western pictorial tradition in order to confront us with an uncomfortable question: how much of our way of seeing continues to be built upon a long visual pedagogy of violence?

José Luis Pérez Pont

The contemporary city is a territory saturated with images. Every day we move through physical and digital spaces where visual stimuli constantly compete to capture our attention, shape our desires, and define the way we interpret the world. Within this context, certain artistic practices developed in public space continue to preserve a singular capacity: that of momentarily interrupting this accelerated circulation of information in order to generate a different experience of looking. The work of PichiAvo is situated precisely within this space of tension between image, urban space, and the cultural construction of memory.

Since their beginnings linked to graffiti and urban art, PichiAvo have developed a visual language capable of establishing an unusual dialogue between classical tradition and contemporaneity. Far from using Greco-Roman iconography as a simple aesthetic reference, their works activate a much more complex conversation about the permanence of certain cultural narratives and about the ways images survive, transform, or erode over time.

At SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer, the exhibition Élleipsi explores this idea of transformation through the central element of absence. The Greek term that gives the project its title means “lack” or “absence,” functioning here not as a melancholic reference to what has been lost, but rather as an active tool of visual construction. The works are not articulated through the fullness of the image, but through its interruptions. Fragmented classical figures, eroded surfaces, layers partially covering bodies, and frescoes that seem to emerge from wear transform emptiness into a fundamental part of the narrative. Absence ceases to be understood as deficiency and instead becomes a space that activates the gaze.

There is a profoundly contemporary dimension within this operation. We live surrounded by images that appear complete, immediate, and permanent, yet much of our cultural experience is built precisely upon fragments, reconstructions, and scattered remains. Collective memory often functions in this way, through disconnected pieces that the viewer mentally recomposes. PichiAvo transfer this logic to painting and mural surfaces, compelling us to actively participate in the construction of meaning. The work does not close in upon itself but instead requires the observer to complete it.

The recent journey undertaken by the artists to cities such as Athens, Rome, Pompeii, and Naples conceptually runs throughout the entire exhibition. There, among mutilated sculptures, eroded frescoes, and works displaced from their original context, a fundamental truth emerges: much of the symbolic power of classical art lies precisely in its incomplete condition. Ruins do not signify destruction alone; they also activate imagination, projection, and the desire for reconstruction. Élleipsi works from this same archaeological awareness, understanding that images continue to produce meaning even when time, history, or violence have acted upon them.

The incorporation of fresco into PichiAvo’s artistic universe is especially significant. Historically associated with monumental permanence and the idea of cultural transcendence, this technique appears here traversed by processes of erosion, scraping, and fragmentation that alter any notion of stability. The surface no longer presents itself as something closed and definitive but rather becomes a territory of tension between preservation and disappearance. Within this gesture coexist two seemingly opposing traditions: the historical ambition of the monument and the ephemeral nature of urban art.

Perhaps this is one of the most interesting keys to the exhibition. PichiAvo do not propose a confrontation between classical culture and street art; rather, they reveal how both practices share something essential: their need to occupy public space and generate forms of visual communication capable of influencing collective sensibility. Images are never neutral. They construct imaginaries, establish memories, and shape our relationship with the environment.

For this reason, it becomes relevant to reflect on which symbols, narratives, and representations we choose to preserve, transform, or allow to disappear. In Élleipsi, painting functions as excavation. Every removed layer, every isolated fragment, and every incomplete body opens a reflection on the fragility of images and on our permanent need to reconstruct meaning from what is missing. Because sometimes absence does not weaken the image; it makes it even more persistent.

José Luis Pérez Pont