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