Robert Janitz

Saenger Gallery presents at its new headquarters the second individual exhibition in Mexico by the painter Robert Janitz (Alsfeld, Germany, 1962), which is called The Secret of the World.

After making his debut in Latin America with a site-specific exhibition at Casa Gilardi (by renowned architect Luis Barragán) last spring, Robert Janitz is now showing a previously unseen selection of large-format paintings and sculptures integrated into a specially-made color installation. by him for the walls of the Main Hall of Saenger Gallery.

The works that make up El secreto del mundo come in part from various readings that Janitz has carried out in recent years; This list includes from An episode in the life of the traveling painter, a short novel that narrates a decisive moment in which the life and trajectory of the also nineteenth-century German painter Johan Moritz Rugendas was debated while exploring South America, of the eccentric writer César Aira, until El Aleph or The writing of the god by Jorge Luis Borges, where the impossibility of communicating that which gives form and meaning to existence, and which nevertheless transcends it, on a daily basis, is recounted: the revelation of a message that makes it possible to understand everything, the secret of the world

Corresponding to this intention, to this impossible search that has been charged with a strong sense of humor and irony, the recent work of Robert Janitz abounds in the landscape, as an artifice of painting and an event of nature, as the one that the artist has been discovering (and recreating in the degraded background and in the synthetic front of his polychrome paintings) since establishing his residence in Mexico City and that, like the mysteries of the universe, has not yet been completely deciphered before his stalk.

The Secret of the World by Robert Janitz offers a heterogeneous and coherent vision of a landscape that, from being so real, a volcano for example, becomes imaginary, a scribble that in the repetition of its forms articulates an order, the announcement of a writing that summons us and questions from its joint closeness and strangeness.

— Christian Barragan