Contenido Neto (tercer lote) by Benjamín Torres

Twenty years after its first presentation at the contemporary art fair Zona MACO (Mexico City, 2006), artist Benjamín Torres revisits the project Contenido Neto and presents it in the Project Room of Saenger Galería. This exhibition consists of an installation composed of sculpture and collage, in which the viewer is invited to participate through the almost immediate recognition of commercial products—such as packaged and bottled foods—rendered mute and transformed into plaster forms, arranged on surfaces like a table or a shelf, as well as through the use of the original packaging of these same products incorporated into collage.

By doing so, Benjamín Torres brings to light our position as consumers in a society “hypnotized by advertising,”¹ while also underscoring how these objects—despite lacking image, text, or color—remain inscribed in both collective and individual memory as an effect of a contemporary, universal, and inescapable condition: the ubiquity of advertising strategies in everyday life. By placing these anonymous commercial objects within a gallery setting, Torres introduces a critical irony that extends to the art market itself, revealing how systems of display and consumption operate—through different strategies—upon the same mechanisms of desire and value.

In Contenido Neto, Benjamín Torres’s work unfolds as a paradoxical game in which art exposes the irony of consumption from within its own structures. By transferring the codes of commerce into the exhibition space, the installation does not position itself outside the logics it examines; rather, it activates them and renders them visible from within the very system that produces them. It is precisely this paradoxical condition that allows critique to emerge, simultaneously revealing its limits and its potential as a tool for reflecting on contemporary culture.

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1 Guillermo Santamarina (2013). Los efectos físicos a largo plazo son aún desconocidos, Museo Carrillo Gil.