O pico, a saia e o pé is a stroll through the landscape, a pictorial genre that not only represents nature as it is, but is also a social and cultural construction of that world anchored to the physical substrate, reality and fiction, continent and content. ‘The mountains studied by geographers are not complete if one does not look at the other mountains created,’ said geographer Eduardo Martínez de Pisón in his lecture ‘The art that creates mountains’ on 16 June 2019 at the César Manrique Foundation, referring to the need to understand the landscape through art and culture.

The title of the exhibition invites us to play. Three polysemic words in Spanish and Galician (peak, skirt and foot) are used colloquially to refer to the parts of a mountain, although in their other meanings they have no reference to the landscape. Similarly, in a clear commitment to the playful conception of art and taking artistic pedagogy as an object of reflection, simple geometric shapes run throughout the exhibition. In these, graphic synthesis and colour play a fundamental role, inviting us to reflect on the cultural idea of landscape. Geography becomes art, linking shapes and images that remind us of children’s cut-out books. This exhibition encourages disorder, or a new order.

In O  pico, a saia e o pé  paintings and collages on unconventional supports in the field of painting, such as geography book covers, recycled cotton fabrics or reused felt from an engraving workshop, engage in dialogue. None of them are mere supports, but territories that reveal the traces of a previous life. In the main room of the gallery, a large installation made up of tools used in artists’ workshops demands interpretation. They will acquire the status of landscape when there is an eye to contemplate the whole and interpret it emotionally. The landscape is not what is there, it is what we want to see.