Landscape as Trap: The Art of Mateo Maté Exposes the Aesthetics of Violence

At first glance, the eye is seduced by a harmonious landscape. On closer inspection, it is confronted with a brutal reality: the canvas is, in fact, the fabric of military uniforms. Through this duality, Spanish artist Mateo Maté, in his incisive new exhibition “Timeless Landscapes,” orchestrates a masterful exposé of the aesthetics of power, revealing the sinister kinship between art history and the strategies of modern warfare.

The exhibition serves as the inaugural manifesto for the new gallery SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer, which reopens the historic space of the Galería Joan Prats with an ambitious curatorial vision. In a sharp curatorial dialogue with a show by the Italian artistic duo Miaz Brothers, Maté’s work positions the gallery as a new epicenter for critical thought on the city’s art scene.

Maté’s methodology is a radical conceptual inversion. Camouflage, a visual language developed to deceive and facilitate death, is transformed into an instrument of revelation. The artist goes beyond the material to expose its hidden lineage: he demonstrates how the Impressionist and Pointillist quest to capture the subjective perception of light was co-opted and instrumentalized by military logic. The fragmented brushstrokes of Monet, which sought the essence of light on a cathedral, find a perverse echo in the pixels of digital camouflage, designed to fracture the human form and elude the electronic eye.

“I am trying to give back to art what war has taken from it,” Maté explains. His works are thus an act of symbolic restitution, where the landscape’s apparent beauty forces the viewer to confront the violence woven into its very fabric.

For the curator, José Luis Pérez Pont, the exhibition is a direct critique of our times, an era in which “images function as forms of manipulation or resistance.” Mimesis transcends military tactics to become a metaphor for the narrative mechanisms that shape reality. In a world of “slippery certainties,” the curator warns, “the symbolic becomes a weapon of mass distraction.”

Ultimately, “Timeless Landscapes” is an exercise in perceptual guerrilla warfare. Maté offers us not landscapes, but critical apparatuses that weaponize our gaze, forcing us to interrogate the very mechanics of seeing. His art is an urgent call for visual literacy, a challenge to decode the hidden intentions in the fabric of the world and to understand that, in the face of power, the innocence of the gaze is always the first casualty.