There is a hole at the center of Henrique Detomi’s painting. It is where the work begins, with the earth laid open and with what is missing. Born in Belo Horizonte and raised in Lagoa Santa, in the interior of Minas Gerais, the artist makes walking the first gesture of his practice. Traversing the landscape is how he comes to know it, and it is from this experience on foot that the works brought together in In the Body and in the Landscape, What Remains Is Dust emerge. Curated by Allan Yzumizawa, the exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation in São Paulo.
The hole first appears as a drawing. In Vertigem (Vertigo), a series begun in 2020, Detomi works with cavities in the earth using charcoal on paper and, on a larger scale, oil stick on fabric. The hole appears suspended against the smooth surface of the support, defined only by the shadow of its depth. From this suspension arises the vertigo that gives the series its name: the instability of standing at the edge of a depth that cannot be fully grasped. This is the most direct form of the void that recurs throughout the exhibition, and it is also where drawing asserts its own material and visual weight.
The landscape of Minas Gerais then enters the work through matter itself. Confronted with a state deeply marked by mining, Detomi paints the terrain and seeks to understand what extraction does to the earth. In Extravio ou do Ouro ao Pó (Loss, or From Gold to Dust), a series from 2025, cement and stone become painting supports, prepared with transparent acrylic gesso, while the mountain begins to bear on its surface the trace of what has been removed from the ground. The gold named in the title ends as dust, and it is this residue that the title of the exhibition gathers.
The void reappears within the painting itself, where absence becomes the subject. In Minutos Antes do Fim (Minutes Before the End), part of the canvas is left unpainted. These areas are reserved with adhesive masks that, once removed at the end of the process, reveal the bare surface of the support. At times, these cutouts take the form of a mountain; at others, they close into the right angle of a wall, introducing into the landscape the perception that something is no longer whole. In A Falta do Céu (The Absence of the Sky), from 2024, the landscape appears without the sky, against an entirely white support, and the refusal to paint the upper part of the image makes the loss of the landscape itself visible. The absence Detomi paints is that of a territory emptied by extraction, but it is also our own: the sense that something is being lost. The title Minutes Before the End holds this urgency, the feeling of standing before the probable end of something.
The research then descends into the earth. In Imerso até os Olhos, Escuto o Silêncio da Terra (Immersed up to My Eyes, I Listen to the Silence of the Earth), from 2025, the artist’s sustained contact with grottoes leads him toward thick, almost geological surfaces of paint. The painting approaches the materiality of rock and calls for a gaze that is also tactile: to see the work is to move across its texture.
From the extracted mountain to the silence of the cave, the exhibition follows a single movement. The landscape becomes a record of what happens to the earth, while each work preserves the memory of a path traced by the body. What remains from this journey is dust, what is left of the mountain and also of those who have traversed it. Before the works, viewers are invited to dwell on an absence and to consider the future of the territory they carry within them.