The forms of the abstract language in the twentieth century art usually form reduced constructions of the processes in nature. Piet Mondrian is a very clear example of this, so his painting is just a bidimensional abstraction of the Dutch landscape. In an analytical way, the topographic reduction of the Canarian landscape that José Antonio Zárate offers means both, an opposition to the traditional idea of the landscape as an impressionistic postcard and the possibility of building an alphabet of elemental forms extracted from the information that knowledge offers.

In such natures as in the Canarian one in which we abruptly ascend from the zero height to heights above one thousand metres, in all the islands except Fueteventura and Lanzarote, such reduction has a meaning and admits any aesthetic application.

On the other hand, the alphabet of the heights has such an analogical relation with marine waves, that signs refer to adjoining spaces: the land, vertical and abrupt, and the sea sorrounding the islands, horizontal but generally rough.

Zárate's topographic alphabet aims to read the space of the island as a dynamic space, so the tensons that bends symbolize in their aesthetic application allude to a constant moving nature. Tensons are also vectors meaning the direction of such telluric movements. In this way, the topographic representation renounces to its descriptive functionality in order to reveal the natural reality order hidden before the appearances of the sensitive world. Nevertheless, we can always find someone mistaking reality with art. As Borges said: "Map and territory are not the same thing".