We look forward to seeing you at ‘By Invitation’ with Mónica Jover Calvo and Ivan Forcadell.

SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer will take part from November 6 to 9 in By Invitation, the modern and contemporary art fair held at the Círculo Ecuestre in Barcelona.

In the Palacete section, Mónica Jover Calvo presents a selection of works and a thread installation created specifically for the event, blending pictorial lyricism with technical experimentation. Her practice, focused on painting yet deeply influenced by the textile field and the use of thread as an essential element, is marked by an introspective sensitivity that explores the nature of being.

In addition, visitors can also enjoy a selection of works by Ivan Forcadell, whose vibrant and irreverent aesthetic—featuring bold colours and an open narrative—is always ready to engage playfully with the viewer.

The sixth edition of this fair revolves around the concept “Lines of Time”, a reflection on time as a fabric that connects generations, geographies, and imaginaries.

DATES AND OPENING HOURS
Thursday, November 6 · 5:00–8:00 p.m.
Friday, November 7 · 12:00–8:00 p.m.
Saturday, November 8 · 12:00–8:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 9 · 10:00–3:00 p.m.

If you wish to attend, send us an email at barcelona@seltz.art and we’ll send you your invitation.

Come and experience SELTZ at By Invitation.

In Cataratas, Cristina de Middel offers a critical reflection on the way we see—or believe we see—the world, particularly in relation to Africa. A waterfall clouds our vision, blurs the contours and turns looking into an uncertain act. In a present saturated with images, where photography has lost its aura of truth to navigate between overexposure and suspicion, de Middel chooses to embrace blurring as part of the creative process.

The exhibition is structured around a selection of works from several of the artist’s iconic series—The Afronauts, Midnight at the Crossroads, Funmilayo, Mirador, and This is What Hatred Did—which challenge colonial imaginaries, dominant media narratives, and the stereotypes that have historically constrained the representation of the African continent.

Far from offering definitive answers, these images act as fragmentary gestures, open visual questions that point to the limits of our perspective. The “cataract” in the title alludes both to cultural opacity and to the relentless torrent of images that shape our perception. In this context, accepting that limit becomes the first step toward seeing—and understanding—differently.

Con la boca abierta is a deeply personal project by Cristina García Rodero, born from an intimate observation of her creative process. It is a unique thematic retrospective that spans nearly all the places and subjects the artist has explored over the past half-century.
Unlike the eyes, which are often considered the focal point of the face, the mouth—despite its complex musculature and its rich expressive potential—tends to be overlooked. Yet, it is the most perfect translator of human emotion. The accumulation of images depicting people with their mouths open, and all the emotions this conveys—ranging from excitement and enthusiasm to exclamations of joy or deep sorrow—turns the mouth into a profoundly nuanced element, capable of revealing our innermost feelings like nothing else.
Open mouths connect us to the universe: it is through them that we breathe in and out, engaging in a silent dialogue with the world around us. Open mouths sustain us in life and allow us to communicate with everything that surrounds us—they are the vehicle through which we shout, scream, suffer, nourish ourselves, laugh, yawn. Every possible shade of emotion is condensed in this essential organ, where feeling takes form. This project represents fifty years of artistic exploration of the human body and soul, approached through this singular perspective—perhaps as it has never been seen before.
The resulting series of photographs, beyond their remarkable formal quality, possess an expressive depth—sometimes theatrical or grotesque, sometimes more naturalistic. Carnivals, music festivals, and popular celebrations intertwine with moments at the beach, religious ceremonies, and spiritualist rites. "The thematic breadth makes this series a fascinating polyhedron of life's many facets," explains Cristina García Rodero.

The project follows the natural cycle of life, beginning with the cry and open mouth of a newborn and ending with the grimace of death. "I chose to start with the cry of life because an open mouth also expresses suffering. But I specifically chose birth because the moment a baby cries is the moment it begins to breathe on its own—it is no longer breathing through the mother, but through itself. So, I started with birth and ended with death, capturing different situations where people have their mouths open. The truth is, it was a fun process—there is humor, there is tragedy, because life is all of that."
Juan Carlos Moya played a crucial role in bringing this project to life at CEART Fuenlabrada in late 2014, and since then, it has evolved in various ways.
This special exhibition, curated by Juan Carlos Moya and Rafael Doctor, distills half a century of Cristina García Rodero’s intense artistic work. At the same time, it inaugurates the new gallery project in Barcelona, SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer, which aspires to become a key reference in the city's cultural and artistic scene.

The days still have twenty-four hours, but their measure no longer seems sufficient. In a time dominated by haste and superficiality, the painting of Carlos Tárdez (Madrid, 1976) asserts the value of slowness, contemplation, and pause as exercises of resistance. The precise moment refers not only to the depicted instant, but to the very act of looking—a conscious exercise that demands a kind of disobedience in the face of the continuous flow of stimuli.

Tárdez proposes a reeducation of time. His images, realistic in appearance, do not seek formal exactness but emotional resonance, the point at which observation becomes thought. His works are not closed narratives, but triggers of memory. They do not tell a story; they summon its possible versions.

Artistic practice, in this context, reveals itself as an act of lucid resistance, and at the same time an exercise that seems useless, yet is essential precisely for that reason. In times when usefulness is the measure of all things, art claims its uselessness as a refuge of the human.

His characters—adolescents caught in gestures that still belong to childhood—embody that transition between worlds, the moment when innocence gives way to awareness, when play begins to blend with responsibility, and the gaze becomes more reflective. In them persists the desire to hold on to what is lost, to keep alive a way of relating to the world based on curiosity and primary emotion. Without a doubt, growing up is nothing more than learning to look anew.

Each work by Carlos Tárdez measures time differently, not in minutes or days, but in intensity, in the mark left by experience when it is observed calmly. His painting reminds us that it is still possible to stop, to observe without guilt, to let thought rest upon the visible. And it may be that such a simple gesture is today the most radical form of freedom.

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

There are images that speak to us not through what they show, but through what they conceal. The work of the Miaz Brothers is situated precisely on that threshold: a suspended territory where the visible dissolves and the recognizable becomes enigmatic. In their new exhibition, L’immagine che aspetta, the Italian duo continues to deepen a gesture that is both personal and radical: the subtraction of form to make space for experience.

For brothers Roberto and Renato Miaz, art holds the potential to revolutionize perception and guide us toward new levels of understanding reality. They begin with the premise that what we usually see is not an image that exists in itself, but one in constant flux—transience is the only possible state.

Their work explores the relationship between matter and antimatter. These blurred images are composed of thousands of particles of color applied with an airbrush; the pigment never actually touches the canvas. Not a single line connecting two points is used, as the line—according to the artists—would break the balance and proportion that holds the composition together. Their ethereal appearance captures a fleeting moment of composition or decomposition of the human form, reflecting the transitory nature of evolution.

In an era of facial recognition, of constant overexposure, of algorithms assigning identity, the Miaz Brothers propose an aesthetic and ethical inversion. Against the logic of surveillance, they offer their figures a precious anonymity—a visual escape that disarms any attempt at classification. Theirs is not a painting that affirms, but one that dissolves. It doesn’t aim to confirm reality, but rather to fracture its perception, creating a visual field of active uncertainty. Each work becomes a perceptual exercise: it’s not about what is seen, but what one is willing to imagine, remember, or even misinterpret. And in that space of doubt and potential error, the artists locate the most deeply human gesture. L’immagine che aspetta doesn’t impose a reading—it demands our participation as co-authors of meaning.

Their proposal arises from a profound understanding of the image as a field of transformation. They begin with a simple but powerful idea: everything is in transit. What we see, what we believe, what we are. Their works are not static representations, but suspended moments within a constant process of appearance and disappearance. In this sense, their portraits do not portray bodies, but states of consciousness.

The exhibition also stands as a statement of intent in an era overwhelmed by immediate stimuli. Against the noise of the obvious, these brothers invite us to look slowly, to engage in a form of contemplation that seeks not certainties, but questions. In their images, the human is not a closed form, but the possibility of seeing oneself free from the tyranny of fixed definitions.

In this space of symbolic fog, of originless traces, painting becomes an act of resistance—not through shouting, but through whispering. Not by accumulation, but through subtraction. A visual revolution that requires no stage, because it unfolds in the intimate. Because it happens, quietly, within the gaze of the viewer.

To do something revolutionary without it seeming so is no easy feat. The work of the Miaz Brothers represents a revolution in the realm of emotion. The chemistry between their artworks and the observer activates responses that may have lain dormant. The moment of material detachment embodied in their pieces fits within the artists’ philosophical stance: the need for a liberating exercise in a world saturated with stimuli tied to the tangible, in a society overly attached to the grasp of objects, in individuals whose idea of happiness has been conditioned by possession—even in the realm of emotion.

The works featured in this exhibition embody the lightness of those who have learned to live with little baggage, untethered from the chronic materialism that has defined a global trajectory now revealing some of its darkest consequences. What we commonly call “crisis” is, in fact, a sign of the exhaustion of the foundational principles of an ideology that has dominated recent decades.

What takes form is only a representation of our ideas and beliefs; the capacity—and the possibility—to construct a different reality is in our hands, one based on new ideas and unmediated approaches to understanding experience. Positioned within the transitional space of the Miaz Brothers’ works, the individual is offered the opportunity to self-revolutionize—for that, and not some other, is the revolution currently underway—one that radically and peacefully transforms the essence of what we have known.

José Luis Pérez Pont