The ESCAPE – a tale
She had always lived in the foreground.
Her roles arranged like clean architectural lines, giving structure to the visible world.
From the outside, everything held its place. But she felt the quiet pull of another geometry, one that did not close but opened.
The ocean appeared to her as a horizon – a vanishing point where all lines converge and slip beyond sight.
A line of flight: not an escape from life, but a break within it.
A courage that fractures the given and invents another territory.
One evening, she walked toward the water and did not return.
There was no spectacle, only the subtle radicality of leaving.
In stepping out of her assigned coordinates, she loosened the codes that bound her to the ground.
She did not disappear; she deterritorialized.
She became verb instead of noun – to flow, to flow, to carve, to imagine.
What remained were traces: an empty stage, a mask on a chair, her reflection lingering in memory.
Like the vanishing point in a drawing, her disappearance created depth.
Ana Mazzei, 2026
In The Escape, Ana Mazzei transforms the Nina Horvitz Galerie into an immersive spatial environment that blurs the boundary between the physical and the imagined. The exhibition brings together four wall-mounted sculptures in wood, painted bronze, and metal; six oil paintings on linen; and a six-minute video. Rather than presenting discrete works, Mazzei stages a unified composition in which architecture, objects, and viewers are interdependent.
Drawing on the silent piazzas and elongated shadows associated with early twentieth-century Italian Metaphysical Painting, Mazzei reconsiders space as a psychological condition. Architecture is not a passive backdrop but an active element that shapes perception. Forms hover between painting and sculpture, extending subtly into the viewer’s field, while the canvases interrupt rather than frame space. The video introduces duration, destabilizing the stillness of the sculptural forms and activating the exhibition as a temporal experience.
Spectatorship is central to the work. The viewer’s movement completes the installation, with scale, proportion, and display carefully calibrated to heighten bodily awareness. The gallery becomes a mutable field shaped by circulation, light, and shifting vantage points. Though the installation originates in drawing, it evolves through direct engagement with the site and the artist’s physical presence within it.
The Escape does not propose a literal exit, but a perceptual shift. It suggests a moment in which space loosens its functional certainty and reveals itself as constructed and staged. In this suspended atmosphere—at once precise and enigmatic—the familiar becomes subtly estranged.
By sustaining a tension between material presence and psychological projection, Mazzei creates an environment that invites slow looking and embodied attention. Space itself emerges as the exhibition’s central medium: a site of introspection and speculative possibility.
The Escape takes place in collaboration with Martins&Montero.
Ana Mazzei (b. 1979 in São Paulo, Brazil) holds a BFA from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) and an MA in Visual Poetics from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Early in her career, residencies such as the Independent Study Program at Escola São Paulo and a scholarship at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris helped shape her innovative artistic language.
She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows, including Garden Scene at Martins&Montero, São Paulo (2024); Love Scene, Crime Scene at gb agency, Paris (2023); Vai, vai, saudade at Museo Madre, Naples (2024); The Disagreement: A Theatre of Statements at Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna (2024); the 37th Panorama of Brazilian Art at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2022); and Drama O’Rama: Other Scenes at Glasgow International (2021), among others.
Mazzei’s work is held in prestigious public and private collections, including the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Paris), Glasgow International Collection (Scotland), MASP — Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Brasileira — FAAP (São Paulo), Nouveau Musée National (Monaco), Sammlung Philara Collection (Düsseldorf), and S.M.A.K. (Ghent).