Exhibitions
Francesc Torres returns to Barcelona to question the future
The future is no longer what it used to be, inaugurates the SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer season with an exhibition curated by José Luis Pérez Pont that confronts memory, history, politics and the meaning of art.
The future is no longer what it was , by Francesc Torres, starts precisely from the fracture and imagining the future. More than thirty-five years after his last exhibition in a gallery in his hometown, the artist returns to Barcelona with a project that revisits some of the issues that have crossed his trajectory: memory, history, the promises of progress and the capacity of art to produce thought in a world increasingly saturated with images.
Curated by José Luis Pérez Pont, the exhibition inaugurates the SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer exhibition season as part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, organized by Art Barcelona. Torres' return takes on special significance after the Catalan artist received the Velázquez Prize for Visual Arts in 2024, in recognition of a career spanning more than five decades that has placed him at the center of international contemporary art.
The title of the exhibition functions as a key to reading. For much of modernity, the future was constructed as a promise: each generation would live better than the previous one, knowledge would prevail over superstition, democracy would advance against authoritarianism and memory would prevent the repetition of the great disasters of history. Torres observes this story from the present and introduces an uncomfortable question: what remains of that confidence in the future?
The answer does not lie in nostalgia or a conventional reconstruction of the past. What Torres does is use history as a critical material to interrogate the present. His gaze connects times, geographies and experiences that, at first glance, might seem distant: from Hopper to China, from the Spanish Civil War to the migration policies of the United States, from Sitting Bull to Duchamp, from family memory to the evolution of the human species. The result is a constellation of references in which the past does not appear as something closed, but as a matter that continues to transform and reappear in the present.
This way of working with memory takes on a particularly personal dimension in Traveling with the Family , one of the central works in the exhibition. Torres turns his own biography into a way of accessing collective history and articulates family memory, history, human evolution and political experience in the same installation. "This work has only been possible now," says the artist, a phrase that highlights the extent to which the piece is also the result of a trajectory spanning more than five decades. The family that gives the work its title is, in this case, both his own family and the wider family of the human species.
If this piece looks towards memory, Don't Make Art Unless It Is Absolutely Necessary! shifts the question towards the very meaning of artistic practice. In a context dominated by an incessant production of images, Torres poses necessity as a condition of art and questions some of the most widespread interpretations of Duchamp's legacy. The question is no longer simply what art can be, but why it is necessary to make art. Not everything is art; for Torres, the work must respond to a need to produce meaning.
It is at this point that The Future Is No Longer What It Was connects with one of the great challenges of the present: how to think amidst a constant acceleration of images and discourses. Faced with a visual ecosystem in which circulation seems to advance faster than our capacity for interpretation, Torres claims art as a form of thought and as a space to introduce complexity where public debate tends to seek immediate answers, certainties and slogans.
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