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Starting February 28, Gruta – Espaço de Arte Contemporânea presents the solo exhibition “The City of the Shining Stone” (A Cidade da Pedra que Brilha) by Paraíba-born artist Tiago Malagodi. The collection of 16 new paintings is the result of an investigation merging classical physics, geopolitics, and affective memory regarding Itabira (Minas Gerais)—a landmark city of Brazilian mineral exploitation and the birthplace of poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

With an introductory text by Matheus Morani, the show proposes entropy—the Second Law of Thermodynamics regarding the irreversibility of time—as a lens through which to read the landscape of Minas Gerais. “In Malagodi’s canvases, mining appears as the entropic operation par excellence,” states Morani. “It compresses millions of years of geological formation into a few decades of exploitation, accelerating the dissipation of matter and transforming mountains into absence.”

The series utilizes a reduced palette of grays and blues, a choice that evokes the nature of raw iron ore. In a dialogue with Robert Smithson’s land art, Malagodi transforms tracks and mines into landmarks of a degraded temporality. The landscape is treated not as a backdrop but as a system: a field where geological, historical, and symbolic energy is progressively converted into dispersion and ruin.

Woody Woodpecker as a disruptive force

At the center of these scenes emerges Woody Woodpecker (Pica-Pau), a figure the artist encountered during a four-hour wait for a train in Nova Era (MG). “I befriended a boy, the grandson of a railway worker, who lived between the Doce River and the tracks. He said he only knew how to draw Woody Woodpecker, and we swapped drawings,” Malagodi recalls.
The boy’s sketch hung on the artist’s wall alongside photos of Itabira, forming a mnemonic map that began to unsettle him. “I discovered the character emerged around the same time the Vale mining company was founded, during the interwar period. He began to function as an anachronistic unifier of imperialist soft power, operating less as an illustration and more as a disruptive force.”

From the academy to the canvas

The project expands on the artist’s 2020 Master’s thesis at Unesp, titled “Entropy and Landscape,” which began with a train journey to Itabira via the Vitória–Minas line along the Doce River. This academic work—now unfolding into pictorial practice—establishes a critical dialogue with the writings of Robert Smithson, recontextualizing the North American artist’s thought within the Brazilian landscape.

The investigation also crosses the poetic density of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “The Machine of the World” with the eponymous essay by José Miguel Wisnik, reflecting on how local identity is shaped by global geopolitical forces.

In conceiving the works, Malagodi avoided literal illustration of archives. Instead, he adapted sources ranging from an 1822 engraving by Prince Maximilian to his own photographs of the Cauê mine, the Rosarinho Church, and the old Drummond family farm—now transformed into a tailings dam.

The result is a collection of paintings that creates a tension between belonging, historical dependency, and the erosion of time within the Brazilian landscape. Beneath the silence of gray tones, Malagodi’s canvases depict the residual glow of a land that—caught between the weight of the ore and the strength of its legacy—resists its own erasure