Archive

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

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

SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer takes part in the 13th edition of Art Photo Bcn from May 8 to 10 at the DHub, alongside Cristina García Rodero. The artist will present two of her most emblematic series: "Holi, la celebración del amor" and "España Oculta", offering a unique opportunity to experience her deeply human and documentary gaze.

The series "Holi, la celebración del amor" continues García Rodero’s immersive way of working from within the celebrations themselves, with a direct and intimate perspective. On this occasion, the photographer travels to India to document Holi, a festival that marks the arrival of spring and celebrates love, color, and the triumph of good over evil. In these images, color is not just a visual element but the core of the experience- it replaces the black and white of España Oculta and enhances the sense of movement, contact, and collective energy. García Rodero places herself within the action, allowing the intensity of the moment to shape each photograph.

The series "España Oculta" is a direct and unfiltered journey through Spain’s traditions, festivals, and popular rituals at a time of profound transformation. Trained at the Complutense University of Madrid and supported by a grant from the Juan March Foundation, the photographer began a research project that led her to travel across the country for more than fifteen years. Through just over one hundred black-and-white images, Cristina García Rodero presents a real- and at times surreal- portrait of a society observed through its moments of celebration and ritual, at a time when a new world was emerging.

From May 8 to 10. We look forward to seeing you!

STAND 1
Art Photo Bcn – DHub Barcelona
Friday 8 and Saturday 10 from 11:00 to 21:00
Sunday 11 until 19:00

Certainly, the practice of being an artist is not easy, even less so under the pressures derived from an era marked by speed and immediacy. Paraphrasing Edward W. Said, when he speaks about the importance of the intellectual’s passionate commitment to what they do—the risk they assume, the exposure of their ideas regardless of the medium, the dedication to certain principles, as well as the vulnerability required to debate and to become involved in worldly causes. Each and every intellectual who works professionally in the articulation and representation of particular viewpoints or ideas logically aspires for the outcome of their work to be effective within society. An intellectual who claims to work solely for themselves, or out of a pure desire to learn or to produce abstract knowledge, cannot and should not be believed.

In the recent practice of Mónica Jover Calvo, painting undergoes a sustained process of displacement. Far from reaffirming itself as an autonomous surface, it opens up to a relational logic in which matter, time, and perception are intertwined. This shift does not respond to an abrupt change, but to a coherent evolution in which each formal decision seems to derive from a careful listening to the medium’s own limits. Within this process, there is also a taking of position: to paint today implies assuming the risk of insisting on a language that has been declared obsolete on multiple occasions, and doing so from a critical awareness of its place within a visual ecosystem dominated by speed and obsolescence.

VELVET REVOLUTION articulates this moment with particular clarity by bringing together two complementary dimensions: works on stretcher and a site-specific intervention that traverses the gallery space. The tension between them is not merely formal but structural, allowing painting to be understood as an expanded system that exceeds its traditional boundaries. In this context, Jover Calvo’s practice tangentially approaches certain logics of digital culture: overlapping layers, interconnected structures, images that seem to be constructed as if they were networked files, where each fragment contains the possibility of recomposition.

In the wall-based works, thread introduces a different cadence in the construction of the image. Its presence modulates the rhythm of the surface, interrupts the continuity of the pictorial plane, and makes visible the time invested in its making. Color, developed in dense and enveloping ranges, constructs landscapes that refer to an internalized experience, closer to memory than to description. The compositions suggest horizons, reliefs, or fragments of nature, though always filtered through a constructive logic that underscores their condition as artifice. As in certain editing or montage processes, the image appears to be in a permanent state of adjustment, as if it never fully settles.

This same logic is amplified in the large installation of threads that runs through the architecture of the gallery. Here, the line definitively abandons the stretcher and is projected into space as a tensioned mesh that organizes the viewer’s movement. The gaze becomes mobile, compelled to adjust its position, to attend to variations in density, to perceive how the work transforms with each displacement. Space ceases to be a mere container and becomes actively integrated into the aesthetic experience. Thus, the usual relationship between artwork and viewer is altered: instead of remaining at a distance, the viewer becomes involved in a perceptual field that demands participation.

The relationship between both scales—the contained and the expanded—activates a complex reading of the whole. The paintings seem to extend into space, while the installation gathers and redistributes their formal principles. A perceptual continuity is thus generated, in which the works no longer appear as isolated units, but as moments within a single process.

In VELVET REVOLUTION there is no clamor or epic gesture. The revolution to which the artist alludes operates on another scale, closer to intimate experience than to the public representation of conflict. These are shifts that take place in perception, in the way the visible is organized, in the subject’s willingness to pause and to look differently. In this sense, the work appeals to a form of commitment that is not declared but enacted: the insistence on producing images that demand time within a context that penalizes delay.

Throughout her trajectory, Jover Calvo has persistently explored the relationship between landscape, perception, and interiority. In this project, that investigation intensifies by incorporating space as an active part of the language. Landscape ceases to be understood as a distant image and becomes an experience that involves the body, that unfolds in layers, and that is reconstructed in the very act of looking. As Kevin Lynch noted, the image of an environment is never univocal, but rather the result of a constant negotiation between what is offered and what is interpreted; much of the power of these works resides precisely in that friction.

In contrast to contemporary speed and visual saturation, VELVET REVOLUTION proposes another temporality: that of sustained attention, of movement through space, of a gaze that refines itself as it lingers. In that interval, between the image and its process, painting finds a renewed form of persistence. And it is precisely there, in that seemingly minor space, where the deepest transformations are activated—those that do not require noise to decisively alter the way we inhabit the world.

José Luis Pérez Pont

There is a suspicion that runs through our time: that reality has ceased to be a stable territory and has become instead a construction subject to multiple layers of mediation. Fiction no longer presents itself as a separate realm, but as an agent infiltrated into the everyday, capable of reorganizing what we understand as truth. In this context, the experience of the world is shaped by devices of representation that not only describe, but actively model perception.

Rosa Brun’s work is situated at this point of friction. Her practice does not respond to the need to represent a recognizable landscape, but to activate a space where the visible is articulated as a superimposition of layers. Each work functions as a condensation of times, decisions, and intensities that are not offered immediately, but instead require a gaze that lingers, that adjusts, that learns to read in depth.

In an environment saturated with images that seek impact and rapid consumption, the insistence on the work of art—and even more so, on a work constructed through the rigor of color—acquires a dimension that cannot be separated from a certain form of commitment. This is not a programmatic stance, but a practice that assumes the responsibility of generating spaces of experience in which perception is not entirely predetermined.

Color, in Brun’s work, operates both as structure and as event. Far from any historical suspicion that has associated it with the decorative or the superficial, here it unfolds with an intensity that asserts its capacity for thought. In this sense, one might speak of a chromophilic practice, grounded in a trust in color as a vehicle of knowledge, as a field in which tensions, rhythms, and balances are organized and directly affect the viewer.

The works presented in the exhibition—both wall-based pieces and those that extend into the sculptural—configure a territory in which painting approaches the architectural. Not in the sense of imposing order, but in that of constructing spaces of passage. In contrast to the proliferation of contemporary spaces that Marc Augé defined as “non-places,” zones of circulation devoid of identity, Brun’s work proposes an inverse experience: that of a space which, rather than neutralizing the subject, activates them, placing them in a conscious relationship with what they perceive.

This activation, however, does not occur through spectacle, but through a precise economy of means. Repetition, modulation, and minimal variation generate a vibration that displaces the work from the realm of the fixed image toward an almost temporal condition. Planes of color seem to oscillate, as if each contained the possibility of becoming another, as if time did not move linearly but folded back upon itself.

In this sense, the landscapes Brun proposes do not refer to any identifiable place. They function instead as constructions in which perception, memory, and experience intersect. Forms never fully settle; they remain in an unstable balance, as if the image were always in the process of adjustment. The landscape thus ceases to be understood as a setting and becomes something that happens—something that is configured within the act of looking itself.

The title of the exhibition introduces a key that deserves attention. Instability is not presented as an anomaly, but as a structural condition of the contemporary. We live in a time in which systems of reference are constantly reconfigured, in which identity is constructed through external stimuli, and in which experience is fragmented into discontinuous sequences. In this context, Brun’s painting does not seek to offer certainties, but to generate a space in which this complexity can be experienced without simplification.

As Guy Debord pointed out, contemporary alienation does not reside solely in the separation of the subject from their activity, but in the appropriation of their own time. In the face of this logic, these works introduce a suspension. They demand a form of attention that cannot be accelerated, that resists reduction to immediate consumption. In this demand lies, perhaps, one of their most incisive forms of resistance.

Landscapes for an Unstable World does not propose an image of the world, but a way of inhabiting its uncertainty. It is precisely in this openness, in this refusal to fix a single meaning, that Rosa Brun’s work finds its power: in offering the viewer the increasingly rare possibility of constructing their own experience of the real.

José Luis Pérez Pont

The projects of Yucef Merhi (Caracas, 1977) are situated in a territory where language, technology, and history interrogate one another. For more than two decades, his practice has articulated programming, hacking, video games, and technological devices from different eras as critical tools for thinking about the present. In his work, the technical is never neutral; it becomes a field of friction from which to address philosophical, linguistic, political, ecological, and social questions, making visible the often imperceptible fluctuations of the contemporary environment.

In After Atari Poetry XXVI, Merhi returns to one of the investigations that structurally traverse his practice in order to activate a critical reflection on language, technological obsolescence, and processes of cultural construction. The series consists of eight unique pieces made of bicolour methacrylate, in which text is presented as visual matter rather than merely as a vehicle of meaning. Each module incorporates a short poem by the artist, translated into the four most widely spoken languages in Spain—Castilian Spanish, Catalan-Valencian-Balearic, Galician, and Basque—highlighting the political and affective dimension of translation as a form of coexistence.

These texts were originally conceived to be programmed and displayed on a cathode-ray television using an Atari 2600 console, a condition that determines both their two-line structure and their formal economy. In the Spanish version, the poem states: “the poet dreams of his silence / a silence impervious to words.” Far from a merely lyrical reading, the statement points toward a site of tension, where language becomes insufficient and reveals an irreducible remainder, a zone of indeterminacy that exceeds signification.

The pixelated typography designed by Merhi, together with the spatial arrangement of the texts, refers to early systems of digital representation and to the Atari Poetry series, initiated in the year 2000. The colours of the methacrylate likewise evoke the graphic palette associated with Atari and its video games, inscribing the work within a specific technological genealogy. From this position, After Atari Poetry XXVI articulates a convergence of linguistic diversity, shared memory, and critical awareness of models of cultural production and transmission, proposing a poetic gaze that does not shy away from questions of sustainability, both technological and symbolic, in the present.

The series La lettre consists of eight generative videos operating at the intersection of kinetic poetry, geometry, and physical models, giving rise to a hypnotic visual experience. Each piece unfolds the French verse “le poète respire au pied de la lettre,” written by Merhi himself, as a field of forces in constant transformation. The letters move vertically across an undulating surface, generating a continuous rhythm that destabilizes linear reading.

The animated background evokes the wave logic that, in the field of quantum physics, describes the probabilistic behaviour of particles. Rather than illustrating a scientific concept, Merhi establishes a formal analogy between these wave functions and certain visual languages inherited from kinetic art, activating a zone of resonance between science, perception, and abstraction.

At the same time, La lettre invites a reading from the psychoanalytic field by referring to the Lacanian concept of “the letter” as the material support of discourse, that which fixes but also fractures the relationship between language and reality. In these videos, the letter does not appear as a stable unit, but as a mutable entity, subject to forces that make it appear and disappear.

Each work thus functions as a visual meditation on the fragility of symbolic systems and on the way human signs emerge, reorganize, and ultimately dissolve within a continuous flow. In this unstable space, between code, image, and breath, language reveals itself less as an instrument of control than as an open process, traversed by contingency and unpredictability.

Guy Debord warned in The Society of the Spectacle that the admired figures in whom the system is personified are well known for not being what they are—figures that have fallen below the threshold of the most minimal intellectual life, fully aware of it. Merely spectacular rebellion can thus coexist with resigned acceptance of the established order, revealing how dissatisfaction itself has become a commodity and a raw material of the system.

Against this logic, Merhi’s work offers neither slogans nor closed solutions, but spaces for pause and critical breathing. As Walt Whitman wrote, the word Democracy remains a great word whose history has yet to be written, because it has yet to be lived. In that interval—between code and poem, between machine and silence—Yucef Merhi’s practice invites us to rethink language, technology, and the common as open processes, still to be imagined.

José Luis Pérez Pont