Fernando Mando’s Lux Oxidada exhibition comes to Dubai

The Spanish photographer is making his Middle Eastern debut with a show of dramatic landscapes.

A photograph of the Monastery of Bonaval in Guadalajara, Spain by Fernando Manso. Courtesy of the artist

Reminiscent of a scene from a fairy tale, beams of light stream through the crumbling windows of the ancient structure, captured in the precise moment when the light of the afternoon sun pierces the dust-filled air. Upon close inspection, the image resembles a painting. You can make out marks that seem to be brushstrokes and there is an unexplained texture to the image.

But the image is a photograph, and it took the Spanish artist Fernando Manso several months to make. Manso returned to the same site at the Monastery of Bonaval, in the Spanish province of Guadalajara, day after day, week after week until the sunlight, the sky, the dust particles and the rest of the surroundings came together just as he imagined. Then he shot only two frames of the 12th-century relic on his antique-style camera and, with blind faith, left one of the plate negatives in his garden at home for several days, open to the forces of nature, which is what gives the final image its textured and layered effect.

“I take a long time to observe what is happening in one place. I listen, I feel, I enter a meditative state and I will only take the photo when I am sure the result will be the same as what I am thinking – I only shoot when I feel it in my heart.

“Often I spend months and I have also taken as long as three years waiting for the right moment – and if it doesn’t come, I don’t take the picture. I will never use Photoshop or any other editing technology.”

The show, which opened in ­Dubai's Rira Gallery last week, is titled Lux Oxidada – oxidised or rusted light. It is so named from the process as well as the result, and is the artist's first show in the Middle East.

Once Manso discovers a spot that he wants to shoot, he draws a sketch and then makes notes about the light at various points of the day. Once he captures the image on the negative plate, he takes two identical frames – one goes into a plastic pouch for safekeeping and the other is left to nature’s random way.

After a certain period of time, the effects of rain, moisture and other things such as fallen leaves, create stains on the negative that are reproduced in the final print.

“I can’t control this part,” says Manso. “The stains that come and the destruction of nature is totally by chance. It is nature that gives my photographs what I call the oxidising effect.”

Although the Monastery of Bonaval image depends on sunlight, Manso is much more comfortable working in cold weather and has shot many dramatic images in the snow-filled forests of Spain, Portugal and Japan, as well as some beautiful images in the highlands of Scotland and rural England that look like 19th-century Impressionist paintings.

Manso, whose unusual technique has earned him much acclaim in Spain, has produced a series of images for Madrid’s tourist board and also a collection of the Alhambra Palace, currently showing in the city’s National Archaeological Museum.