São Paulo, Brasil
29/10/2026 - 16/12/2026

Exit non exit

Photographs by Cristiano Mascaro
About the doors of almost every interior in the world, from an airport in Doha to a
mall in São Paulo, a small luminous sign repeats the same word: exit. Signaling English inherited it from Latin, where it was a verb in the third person of the present tense — exit, elesai; non exit, he doesn’t go out. This exhibition takes both readings at the same time, dasinalization and ancient grammar, to ask what architecture has always decided before us: which spaces one leaves, in which one remains, and who, after all, is the subject of that verb that crossed the doors of buildings two thousand years ago

.

The photographer and architect Cristiano Mascaro (Catanduva, 1944) built over more than five decades one of the most consistent Brazilian visual investigations into built space. Graduated from FAU-USP, he began his career as a photojournalist in the 1970s, and since then São Paulo has remained the core of his research, the city that he photographed relentlessly remaking himself over its own ruins. The selection collected here, however, reveals the lesser-known length of this route: Bologna, Vicenza, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Salamanca, Batalha, Porto, Lisbon, Paris, London, Warsaw, Havana, Doha, Tokyo, New York, next to Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Salvador, Brasília and the São Paulo metropolis, which is still the measure of all the

others.

What unifies this arch is a question about the nature of the spaces: public or private, sacred or profane, of crossing or of permanence. The cities listed give substance to this question, and it is it that removes the entire inventory of monuments, a genre that Mascaro has always refused. In front of each building, its camera acts as an interrogation instrument, and the human figure — the bystander under the columns of the Capanema, the wife of Abaya in front of the Doha towers, the reader atop the shelves of the Royal Cabinet — appears as a silent measure, the small and mobile term against which the scale of the

building becomes legible.

First, there are the spaces that hold back. The unfinished façade of San Petronio at dusk, the cimborium of the Convento de San Esteban in Salamanca, seen from the cruise, the Monastery of
Battle under the rain, the crypt of San Gennaro, in Naples, where a marble cardinal
He has been kneeling for five centuries in the face of his own silence, the chapel of the Palácio da Alvorada is interviewed behind curtains, the Cathedral of Santa Maria by Kenzo Tange erecting its steel shells like a mineral tent: they are architectures averse to the promise of leaving and which, precisely because of this, open upwards. In them, the Latin verb is conjugated in the negative – non exit – and permanence is the very condition of the experience

they offer.

At the opposite pole are spaces that exist only to be crossed. The Gallery
Vittorio Emanuele, the Milanese cathedral of commerce, is the monumental culmination of the type
architectural in which Walter Benjamin, focusing on the Parisian passages that
they preceded, read the 19th century signature: “a city, a world in miniature”,
according to the nineteenth-century guide that he collects at Passagen-Werk, and, in his own formulation, houses or corridors that don’t have an outside, like the dream. Under the iron and glass dome, those who enter follow the street and, upon leaving, are returned to a place from which they were never absent

.
It is

followed by the deserted escalators of a São Paulo gallery, direct heirs in this way, multiplied in almost liturgical symmetry; the gas station floating in the night fog like a pavilion without a city; the curve of the viaduct where pedestrians descend in line against the low light; the houses of Pelourinho and the Malecón de Havana, facades that time, the only bystander, wears out; the avenues of New York, where Rockefeller Center and Seagram organize traffic of millions who will never stop to see them. These are the territories of permanent exit, architectures whose vocation is flow and whose drama, revealed by the camera, is the empty hour that no

one passes by.

Between the two regimes, exposure lingers on the thresholds, which are perhaps its true subject. Libraries — the Royal Portuguese Reading Office, the very tradition that Brasiliana embodies — guard those who enter and at the same time send them everywhere a book goes. The elevator at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, suspended in the gap between the brick gables by the renovation of Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Eduardo Colonelli and Weliton Ricoy Torres, converts vertical movement into contemplation, and the walled corridor that Álvaro Siza extended in Serralves narrows the world down to a single span of light. The painted ceilings of the theaters, photographed from below in the manner of artificial skies, belong to rooms from which you always leave at the end of the show and which keep, in the vault, the promise that not everything passes. The squares — that of Commerce in Lisbon, the Maggiore in Bologna — are the threshold raised on an urban scale: in them, the entire city has been rehearsing, for centuries, the difference between

being and passing.

Light is the operator of all these distinctions. Sharp or fuzzy, it draws on concrete, marble and glass a rhythm that color would dissolve, and Mascaro’s black and white, oblivious to nostalgia, acts as an analytical reduction: once the color is subtracted, the structure remains, and with it the evidence that the Asinelli tower and the mirrored tower of Warsaw, the Palladio Basilica and the façade of Jean Nouvel respond to the same repertoire of fullness and emptiness, of opacity and transparency, which crosses nine centuries without interruption. In direct dialogue with the architecture of Eduardo de Almeida and Rodrigo Mindlin Loeb, the rooms of the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita and José Mindlin house this repertoire, exploring the contrast between the structural precision of the building and the atmospheric character of the images; the scale of the enlargements and the rhythm
The montage also makes the visit a journey.

The visitor who crosses these rooms will do what the photographs show: he will enter spaces, he will delay in some, he will leave them all – and he will finally be the subject of the verb announced in the title. The exhibition suggests that, at the end of the journey, the small luminous word on the door will have regained its former thickness, and that the difference between leaving and remaining, decided in each era by architecture, will also prove to be a decision about what a society considers worthy of duration. From these images, however, nothing comes out: the time, the light and the bystander they fixed remain there, waiting for those who return. Photography, an art that retains what passes, is the non exit par excellence

.

Luiz Armando Bagolin