"Masera’s work explores the dialogue between material, memory, and human resilience. Having lived and worked across several continents, he transforms cultural encounters into visual and spatial reflections on belonging and impermanence. Materials such as debris, wood, metal, and gold leaf become symbolic languages — remnants of construction and decay that speak of fragility and hope."
In March 2026 the David Krut Workshop team welcomed artist Diego Masera to the workshop to pursue a body of work in print. Masera had been exploring notions of peace and violence in current world politics through his visual art practice. David offered Diego an opportunity to develop these concepts further in the medium of print at the David Krut Print Workshop in downtown Johanensburg.
His approach to the print process was enthusiastic exploration. The team suggested he begin by experimenting with watercolour monotypes, a unique painterly print process. Diego spent time working on the Perspex plates with watercolours at home and brought the prepared paintings into the workshop to be printed with printer Roxy Kaczmarek. His application of the paint was thick and textural and this provided a rich transfer from which a ghost print could be pulled. Thereafter Masera worked into the ghosts with collage, and additional hand painting.
My work is shaped by a life marked by exile, movement, memory, and the search for home. Having lived across different cultures and geographies, I explore themes such as belonging, migration, inequality, fragility, and resilience — not only as personal experience, but as part of a wider human condition.
A second medium Diego explored was blind embossing. After preparing lasercut elements of rifles and Linoleum text, Diego and Roxy used the pressure of the etching press and specialist blankets to create impressions of the perspex and linoleum shapes and text into the paper. The blind embossing offers the subtle trace and memory of the object. A quiet suggestion. Diego has chosen to emphasise some of these shapes with hand-work, emboldening their shape and contour.
After many years of working internationally in the field of sustainable development, I felt the need to speak in a different language: one that could hold complexity, emotion, and contradiction more openly. Art became that space. Through materials, objects, and installations, I try to give form to what cannot easily be said in words — to memory, tension, vulnerability, and the invisible traces of lived experience.
Read more about the artist and his upcoming exhibition here:
