Gerardo Pita. Mines of Riotinto

Madrid, Spain

A landscape so intense it almost stops being landscape — and becomes pure color.

oil paintings on canvas by Gerardo Pita

Image credit

Oil paintings on canvas by Gerardo Pita. © Galeria Leandro Navarro

Meet the artist

The Movement

Contemporary Art, Painting, Realism

ArtLovers Tip

Stand in front of one painting until it stops looking like a place and starts feeling like a force of nature. The magic of this exhibition is that Riotinto appears both real and almost unreal — a landscape that seems to bleed color.

Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see

Contemporary Spanish realism moving toward abstraction.

Gerardo Pita (1950) is known as one of Spain’s renowned realist painters, but in this series the Riotinto landscape pushes his work into a more abstract territory: real places become fields of color, texture, and emotion.

In Minas de Riotinto, Gerardo Pita presents 17 oil paintings on canvas inspired by the landscapes of the Riotinto mining area in Huelva. The artist worked in collaboration with the Río Tinto Foundation, which allowed him to explore the area and take photographs as part of his process.

You’re watching:

Red earth, sulphate salts, pyrite washing facilities, copper residues, slag remains, and river landscapes transformed into painting

Real landscapes that feel almost abstract

A territory shaped by mining, geology, color, and time

Beauty found in places that could easily be read as wounded or industrial

The exhibition is about looking at reality until it becomes something else: matter, rhythm, color, and intensity.

Worth the trip

Yes — especially if you love painting, landscape, and the strange beauty of places marked by human activity.

Because Pita does not romanticize the landscape. He finds beauty in its scars: red soil, mineral traces, residues, riverbeds, and industrial remains. The press release highlights how some works depict specific places but become “practically abstract,” as the artist seeks to reveal the abstraction already present in reality.

It matters because it turns Riotinto into more than a landscape. It becomes a living body of color — beautiful, damaged, magnetic, and impossible to ignore.

How to experience it

Look first from a distance → let the paintings work as color fields

Then move closer → notice how realism and abstraction coexist

Think of Riotinto not only as a landscape, but as geology, memory, industry, and wound

Pay attention to reds, oranges, minerals, and textures — color is the emotional engine of the exhibition

Don’t rush: this is a show about slow looking and material intensity

Madrid, Spain

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