Unanimous critical acclaim for Mateo Maté’s ‘Timeless Landscapes’ at SELTZ

It is unusual for specialist critics to agree so strongly, but ‘Timeless Landscapes’, Mateo Maté’s current exhibition at SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer, has achieved something exceptional: widespread consensus among the cultural press, which is already describing it as an ‘essential’ exhibition.

Various prestigious media outlets have highlighted its conceptual power, political subtlety, and unsettling beauty that challenges the viewer.

El cultural

Julia Ramírez-Blanco, in El Cultural, highlights how the exhibition masterfully articulates the tension between Impressionism and the political significance of military camouflage, reconstructing classical landscapes using fabrics from military uniforms.

ICON – El País and Bonart

ICON – El País highlights how the materials used—camouflage coatings, buttons, labels—act as ‘symbolic brushstrokes’ that challenge traditional aesthetic views. For Bonart, it is an ‘exercise in symbolic justice’ that immerses visitors in a cartography of conflict, traversed by both moral and visual tensions.

Lectura – El Mundo and Expansión

Mario Canal, writing in Lectura – El Mundo, argues that Maté’s work ‘dismantles inherited iconographies to reveal the hidden power in what we believe we see’, while Rafael Mateu de Ros, writing in Expansión, celebrates the way in which the artist connects the visual language of academic naturalism with its subsequent ideological appropriation.

La Vanguardia and Ars Magazine

Juan Bofill in La Vanguardia highlights the installation of the exhibition: the paintings interact with piles of military fabrics scattered on the floor, trampled on, like so many lives in armed conflicts. Along the same lines, Ars Magazine emphasises the artist’s ability to move the viewer and force them to look beyond the surface: these seemingly innocuous landscapes are in fact a wake-up call about the wars that surround us.

When so many authoritative voices agree, it means something is happening. Mateo Maté’s work redefines beauty in the shadow of conflict, turning ‘Timeless Landscapes’ into an experience that is as powerful as it is necessary.

The exhibition can be visited at SELTZ until 12 September and consolidates the gallery as one of the key spaces on Barcelona’s contemporary art scene, both for the curatorial rigour of its proposals and the power of its discourse.

If you are in Barcelona, you can’t miss this exhibition.