SAENGER Gallery is pleased to present, for the upcoming edition of NADA New York, a group exhibition featuring Robert Janitz, Yoab Vera, and Cecilia Barreto—three artists who explore the theme of landscape through painting, offering deeply internalized visions shaped by memory, emotion, and a politically grounded perspective.
Through distinct visual languages and conceptual frameworks, their practices converge in a shared vibrancy—an expressive energy rooted in the cultural fabric of Mexico, whether by origin or by choice. What connects them goes beyond formal approaches: it’s a commitment to reimagining the landscape not as a passive setting, but as an active site of reflection and emotional resonance.
Robert Janitz transforms the landscape into something intimate and anthropomorphic. His paintings evolve from monumental volcanic plumes to the backs of heads, dissolving the boundary between portrait and landscape. With a gestural and open-ended approach, Janitz creates indeterminate forms that elude fixed interpretation, to allow the viewer’s imagination to complete, reinterpret, or question the images before them. His visual language captures the tension between inner and outer worlds—between the landscapes of his native Alsfeld and the physical and emotional terrains of Mexico, where he now lives and works.
Cecilia Barreto brings precision and calm to her abstract compositions, working with canvas, mirrors, and other mediums. Her practice is grounded in representational painting based on verifiable data. What may initially read as refined abstraction in fact depicts feasibility studies for extractive operations by transnational corporations, cost-benefit analyses, and other economic indicators. In this field, abstraction ceases to be neutral: it becomes a space for friction, critical inquiry, and political resonance, expressed through beauty and formal clarity. Barreto seeks to map the globalized landscape through capital flows—especially the pressures of foreign investment operating in Mexico—translating numerical abstractions, territorial disputes, and social impacts into visual terms. Each piece stands as a quiet yet forceful commentary on the present.
Yoab Vera creates atmospheric modules that blur the boundaries between seascape, horizon, and architecture. Using materials like concrete and oil stick, his work evokes the textures of modern Mexican architecture, informed by his Mexico City garden and the coastal light of his studio in Istanbul. His process is both performative and meditative, resulting in what he calls “haptic contemplative” paintings—works that speak of time, longing, and emotional memory.
Together, Janitz, Vera, and Barreto present nuanced, poetic reflections on landscape—not simply as representations of place, but as mirrors of perception and experience. Through color, form, and material, their works open contemplative spaces for the viewer—where beauty, memory, and introspection quietly converge.
