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

The painting of Juan Olivares (Catarroja, 1973) unfolds in the territory of abstraction as an exercise in observation and resistance. Far from the languages of immediacy, his work defends the slow time of the pictorial process and the need to experiment through matter. In Un pam de llum this research is condensed around one axis: light as an agent of transformation, not as a simple visual effect, but as a symbol of inner clarity and the revelation of the invisible.

The artist approaches painting as a space where layers of color function as strata of experience. Each surface preserves the trace of its construction, the marks of a process that does not seek to hide, but to show itself as an essential part of the result. The manual gesture, the density of the oil, the transparency of the pigment, or the weight of color are elements that do not describe an image, but rather produce an atmosphere, a condition of the visible. In this sense, Olivares’s works do not represent but occur, because his painting refers to nothing other than its own existence.

There is in his work a constant tension between control and surrender. Each stroke seems to waver between the precision of one who knows what he is doing and the surrender of one who allows the matter to decide. This duality endows the pieces with a contained energy, a vibration that turns the static into a perceptive event. Light, in this context, is not a motif but a way of understanding the world, a way of seeing through clarity, even when that clarity sometimes blinds.

In the canvases and papers that make up Un pam de llum, painting manifests itself as a space of transition. Forms dissolve without disappearing entirely, as if color preserved the memory of the gesture that originated it. This intermediate condition, between presence and dissolution, is what gives the work its symbolic depth: painting understood as a territory where certainty fades and seeing becomes experience.

Faced with the noise and overexposure of the present, Olivares proposes a practice sustained in silence and observation. His work does not seek to represent light, but to let light happen. That is the true radicality of his proposal: to remember that even a minimal glow, a span of clarity, is enough for the essential to be revealed. Painting, then, does not question the world; it illuminates it.

José Luis Pérez Pont

Reality has progressively transformed into the wasteland of relativity; absolute certainties are increasingly scarce, and in this murky terrain, civil society has so far opted to take shelter while, in the background, the sound of dreaded war drums can be heard. In Timeless Landscapes, Mateo Maté proposes a line of work focused on exploring the terrain of deception, the duplicity staged in public life, and how its effects extend into private spheres. In recent years, the artist has developed an artistic practice grounded in a dual reinterpretation: on one hand, he reimagines 19th-century artworks; on the other, he appropriates military uniforms used in armed conflicts around the globe, using them as raw material to recreate those classical landscapes. The result is a solemn representation built from a rich variety of camouflage patterns, reminding us that in today’s world, almost nothing is what it seems.

While the masses continue their journey through the desert—exhausted by the struggle that survival has once again become, still addicted to obtaining the means to acquire as many consumer goods as possible, chasing a deceptive happiness that paradoxically recedes the harder one strives for it—Lipovetsky had already warned that our society runs on hyperconsumption, not on “de-consumption.” This is the outcome of the post-Fordist system, established through profound shifts in how demand is stimulated, how products are sold, and how consumer behavior and imagination are shaped. These transformations are part of an economic dynamic that began in the late 19th century, aligned with the broader current of the individualist civilization of happiness. Today, industries and services apply choice-based logics, personalize products and pricing strategies, and large-scale retailers adopt differentiation and segmentation policies—many of which mimic military strategy, now applied to economics. Yet all these changes serve only to further commercialize ways of life, feed the frenzy of needs, and tighten the logic of “always more, always new.”

War has historically been viewed as the ultimate stimulus for economic growth—a powerful machine that generates wealth through arms production while sowing destruction that later necessitates reconstruction. Global powers deliberately keep the flame of conflict alive, igniting timely disputes they seek to justify before the global public as reasons for military intervention. The manipulation of language—the altering of word meanings to tell stories aligned with specific interests—enables the capitalization of populist rhetoric. The events that shape international reality, as reported by mass media, are not random accumulations of objective facts; they are the result of narratives carefully constructed by communication experts from the world’s most powerful governments, often in partnership with major cinematic fiction factories.

It is wise, then, to remain skeptical—our senses often deceive us. A vast, powerful meaning-making machine works tirelessly to construct narratives in which millions of people invest their hopes, shaping discourses that magnetize our will. Mateo Maté constructs his own storytelling around us, conjuring a mirage that gently captures the gaze while inviting us not to settle for a first impression. He urges us to look again—to see exactly how the landscape of the real is constructed, as a symptom of the social and economic context of our time. The territory becomes the principal raw material for generating wealth, whether through direct exploitation of its resources or through appropriation of its symbolic values—offering promises of specific qualities that turn out to be trompe-l'œils. Timeless Landscapes presents idealized images of nature, landscapes that once adorned palaces and noble homes, evoking that permanent place of desire, like time capsules from the past. The artist engages with the power of images to suggest, and with the global manipulation that operates through visual storytelling. The abstract desire contained in the idea of nature and landscape is ultimately commodified, as the system endlessly colonizes and commercializes our desires.

It’s impossible not to consider how the implementation of industrial production processes and infrastructure is directly linked to environmental degradation and the reshaping of territory. Yet it seems the real danger lies not in their existence, but in how they are used. The production and consumption of goods and services exist in constant tension between improving business performance and ensuring market competitiveness. While we might believe that individuals have the power to choose and influence consumption trends, it’s clear that in our context, a lack of education in valuing and respecting the natural environment—fueled by decades of omission in the educational system—has shaped a collective consciousness driven by advertising stimuli aimed solely at consumption. The consequences of this transformation process impact both the environment and human life, directly and indirectly. In this spiral, it is crucial to highlight the superfluous nature of many needs generated by the post-industrial economy, whose primary goal is its own survival. Consumer culture has commodified everyday life to such a degree that it has emptied basic social habits of genuine meaning, privileging having and appearing over being—lives more performed than truly lived. In the face of these forces and interests, both personal and collective questioning becomes essential in developing critical capacities that might rescue us from decades of banality.

Art, of course, does not possess the instrumental power to reverse the situations described. Its role is not to resolve conflicts. Still, some artists take on the challenge of addressing them, helping define the role of certain creators as symbolic mediators within society. The great revolution now unfolding—or that is yet to come—will occur on emotional and personal levels of understanding. It is a person-to-person revolution, and thus, stimuli and narratives that activate these spheres of human reflection are more necessary than ever. Non-monolithic ideas and open-ended expressions of thought are like dew—absorbed gently by the natural species they touch. The unveiling performed by Mateo Maté cannot reverse the destructive flows that underpin the global war economy, nor can it take on the power centers where political strategies are crafted and legitimized—strategies that end up shaping the limits of many aspects of our lives. But pointing to the murky dynamics of exploitation—so normalized by their ubiquity—is a way to bring unregulated topics into public discourse. The construction of narrative itself has become the new-old battlefield where the struggle for social communication takes place, with all its potential rooted in civil and creative agency, aimed at planting the seeds of new ideas.

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

Iván Forcadell positions himself between the autobiographical, the rural, and the symbolically everyday in "No título".

Far from offering a closed thematic axis, the exhibition is constructed as an open invitation to the viewer. The artist himself defines it as a space without a fixed center, where tradition, the countryside, nature, folklore, community, life, and death coexist. These elements, more than intellectual concepts, are an essential part of his emotional biography and his aesthetic universe.

Forcadell proposes a perspective free of curatorial labels, opting for a direct and intuitive experience with the work. Rather than imposing a specific reading, No título suggests that each visitor complete the void of the title with their own associations, feelings, and memories. The exhibition thus becomes a fertile ground for interpretation, where the personal mixes with the collective, and the popular with the poetic.