Hopstreet Gallery is delighted to announce ‘Jardin’, the solo exhibition by Massao Mascaro in our gallery space in Deurle.

Humans are makers of gardens just as they are tellers of stories.

The photographs in Massao Mascaro’s Jardin address both these aspects of culture. They all embody delicate tensions occurring in space and in time, a moment never decisive but always suspended, tiny doors opened onto eternity: the space between two hands, a ray of light on a twisted branch, a twig caught in a wired fence, the enigmatic look in a young woman’s eyes.

Nature is an invention of Man, something we came up with to talk about everything which is not human. Nature is a paradox, but one full of nostalgia, as the only thing in our world that is not Man is what came before Man, untouched by our eyes, unnamed by our voices. Nature is something we can only dream of, and the garden is the space we have devised to host such reveries. Gardens are always inhabited by loss, or by dark prophecies of extinction. Just like photographs, they are inhabited by our absence.

This might be the reason why there is always something missing in Mascaro’s pictures, some kind of void. Sometimes it is a shadow, a black hole in the road or the incomplete shape drawn on the ground by empty bottles or scattered pebbles.

Massao’s work is always looking for a delicate balance between autobiography, topography and politics.
The scope of his work is profoundly political, as it is rooted in the need to explore how humans relate to the spaces (both cultural and geographical) they inhabit.

In 2016 the work Jardin was awarded the BOZAR Nikon Monography Series Award. In 2017, he was nominated and be part of the TIFF by FOMU Antwerp. In July 2019 his first book Jardin has been published by Witty Kiwi and L’éditeur du dimanche. In 2021, Massao was part of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award during Les rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles. Last September, he presented the exhibition ‘Sub Sole’ at the Foundation A Stichting in Brussels.

Massao’s work is part of the Art Collection of the Flemish Community, Fondation A Stichting and private collections.

You are warmly invited to the opening Sunday 13 February, 11 – 18:00, simultaneously with the opening of the Museum Dhondt Dhaenens.

Open Saturday and Sunday from 14:00 tot 18:00.