Image: Installation view, ‘Andar es ver’ by Claudia Luna and Benjamín Torres, Project Room, Saenger Galería, Mexico City
Saenger Galería in Mexico City closed two exhibitions on 26 August 2026: ‘Andar es ver’ by Claudia Luna and Benjamín Torres in the Project Room, and ‘Atlas y el otro’ by Robert Janitz in the Main Room. Both had opened on 13 June 2026 and ran in parallel for just over ten weeks, ending with a joint closing event on Wednesday 26 August from 5.30 to 7.30 pm.
‘Andar es ver’ took walking and everyday observation as methods of inquiry. The gallery’s text, by Christian Barragán, positioned both artists’ journeys through Mexico City as a critical reading of urban space, with the figure of the wanderer descending from Flora Tristán’s flâneuse, the transeúnte of Francisco Zarco and the flâneur of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.
Claudia Luna (Mexico City, 1988) translated forms and systems of spatial organisation — bollards, barriers, signage and construction remnants — into sculpture, drawing and ceramics, using shifts in scale and abstraction to show how the city directs movement and conditions sensory experience. Benjamín Torres (Mexico City, 1969) worked through the collection and reorganisation of images and objects from contemporary visual culture, treating the city as an expanded archive of visual, anthropological and historical layers. The text framed their works as decoding the city rather than representing it, arguing that the fragment, the found object and the discarded remnant constitute a form of knowledge.
‘Atlas y el otro’ presented Janitz’s paintings of figures seen from behind — “faceless portraits” that the gallery described as membranes rather than borders, theatricalising the act of looking. Tania Ragasol’s accompanying text drew on Homer’s Atlas as the bearer of great weight and the origin of the word for a compilation of maps, and on Orpheus and Lot’s wife as figures punished for turning to look. Alongside the figures were “volcano-persons” and “cells” set within fields of colour, works the text described as addressing traces and material memory, what remains and what is lost.
Both exhibitions are now listed by the gallery as past. Saenger Galería opened its next pair of shows on 3 September 2026, running to 7 November: ‘Quiet emergence’, the first solo exhibition in the Americas by the Japanese artist Mio Yamato, in the Main Room, and ‘soplar una nube de polvo en la cara’ by Temoc Camacho in the Project Room.
