The photographs used in this exercise are extremely objective. These are aerophotogrammetries, images taken with absolute rigor: a glass-bottomed plane on which a robust camera is placed follows a precise route through all points in a given area with the ideal inclination, and the camera automatically records everything at calculated intervals. After capturing the images, they are assembled in a software that has all the three-dimensional cartography of the area. Therefore, aerophotogrammetry is so true to reality that, if we know what scale it was recorded at, we can calculate the actual distance of landscape extensions in meters or kilometers.

However, there is something surprisingly abstract about these images. Shapes, patterns, textures jump out at our eyes.

For centuries, Western civilization was used to seeing the landscape through a Renaissance perspective. This is the point of view with which we are used to recognizing the world, the view of those on Earth. However, with the advent of satellite photography and its popularization on the internet, as well as access to software such as Google Earth™, we are faced with a totally different way of looking at the landscape. Perhaps the tendency to read these images through abstraction is related to our lack of intimacy with landscapes devoid of the traditional vanishing point, as these are representations in which the depth is vertical.

The title Exercises in Abstract Realism refers to the mental effort demanded by these photographs, an effort to control the ambiguity of our perception that constantly alternates between a recognition of what forms are in reality (houses, trees, stadiums, churches) and what they appear to our eyes (circles, rectangles, cones, lines, volumes).