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Information
Manolo Laguillo. 1986 – 2023
Text by Manoli Mansilla
From May 24 until July 5, 2025
Gray is a mixture of black and white that leans toward neither extreme, but rather resonates with both. Gray
responds to light from deep within; it reveals the forces found in water, in clouds, in stone. It awakens in the first glow of dawn, expands in the rainbow, the pearl,
the opal.
Goethe referred to gray as a non-color due to its ghostly, peripheral power. After all, the etymology of
the word leads us to the dark Flemish term grijsen, which, at least since the early 17th century, was linked
to the effect it produced: the tears shed in mourning the dead. So much so that the technique of grisaille
was known as “dead color painting” because of its destructive use of color and the inert content of the
stone it sought to imitate. Delacroix himself seemed to consider it this way, at least for a time, as noted in an
1852 entry in his Journal, where he resolved to: “Penser que l’ennemi de toute peinture est le gris” (“Consider
that the enemy of all painting is gray”).
Gray is also a color that represents neutrality, the unspecial, linked to indecision and, above all, to the
everyday. It is sometimes attached to nouns, such as gray bread, gray water, gray zones, silvered hair from
age, lawless lands, cloudy days, and countless other less-than-promising circumstances. According to the
court physician Carl Vogel’s report, it was ash gray—the color of Goethe’s face during a panic attack two days
before his death on March 22, 1832.
There is something trapped in gray that seeks release, evoking in the observer a sensation or sentiment of
both past and future. It is no coincidence that this is the dominant color in the images that comprise the
exhibition Manolo Laguillo 1986–2023. Laguillo was a pioneer in introducing the zone system to Spanish
photography in the 1970s—this being the rst method that taught how to correctly expose an image so that
the photograph resembles reality as closely as possible, while also re ecting the photographer’s intent. The
zone system was initially conceived to expose black and white negatives. Its usefulness lay in being a tool that
helped determine which parts of a scene would end up black, white, light gray, dark gray, etc.
Arguably, one of the most authentic merits of this artist is that he never loses sight of the gaze. On one hand,
Manolo Laguillo achieves a high degree of realism and truth in his photographs by showing what lies hidden
behind the false appearance of the visible—what constitutes its condition of possibility: the ordinary.
From this stems the idea that the photographer’s task is to restore, and thereby collectively reinstate, that
which is missing. On the other hand, the presence of gray permeates everyday life to the point of becoming
the color that best represents this transitional era.
Our approach to colors often ignores that they have a history. Modern design and its postmodern aftermath
are marked by a divergence between color and meaning. No one disputes that hope is coded in green,
that red is the color of romantic declarations, or that the skylines of major cities are always etched in gray.
Indeed, one of the most fascinating ways to appreciate the city of Madrid is through its skyline—de ned not
only by the height of its skyscrapers but also by the panoramic views observed from the city’s outskirts,
thanks to the terrain’s topography. The series The Outskirts (1992), Santiago Bernabéu (2014), and
Vicente Calderón (2015) illustrate this well.
The primary gray of liberalism permeates all the images, showing how in an increasingly complex world,
all vectors of change have slipped from our grasp. The architectural ensembles photographed depend on
what they foreshadow—in the case of The Outskirts, the KIO Towers mid-construction—or what they
promise as relics—the now-vanished football stadiums Santiago Bernabéu and Vicente Calderón. Grayscale
reigns, almost imperceptibly, like the pallid hue of our cities. In fact, in Madrid, gray has become the
corporate color of urban elements for several years now: benches, trash bins, planters, traf c lights, etc.
According to architect Carlos Baztán, from Madrid’s Public Space, Works, and Infrastructure Department,
the city council explicitly and consciously chose color as a tool to organize and unify public space. It is a
choice with historical grounding. Baztán leans toward the theory that the memory of customs and practices
in Spain’s capital may have been in uenced by the fashions of Philip IV’s court in the 17th century, where
white, black, and gray tones prevailed—unlike the French court of the same period, dominated by vibrant
colors and lavish golds. In our democratic era, colors still serve to invigorate political action.
Colors go far beyond what we can imagine. Capable of being divided and degraded, scaled across a thousand
levels, our monotonous color no longer horri es observers as it once did. However, for Marie Jalowicz,
a 19-year-old Jewish Berliner, it was the color of death—or so it must have seemed on June 22, 1942,
when she saw dozens of feldgrau uniforms in the Siemens factory where she was a forced laborer.
(Feldgrau, or eld gray, was the of cial basic gray of the German military uniform, especially in World War II.)
By then, Marie, like so many other victims, knew that the trains’ destination was extermination. She ed the
factory, tore off her yellow star, assumed a false identity, and disappeared into the city, surviving as best
she could in Nazi Germany until the war ended. Her son, historian Hermann Simon, got her to tell her story
just months before she died at age 77. The result was several cassette recordings recounting her incredible
memories, which were later condensed into the book Underground in Berlin. Manolo Laguillo met Hermann
Simon in 2013, and a decade later, accompanied him through Berlin, photographing some of the
facades—many buildings were gone, others had been remodeled—of the various homes where Marie had
lived as a German woman in hiding until 1945. While wars are considered times of darkness, the
peacetime that follows drags with it a residue of gray light. The Braunschweig bunker is a good example.
Built in 1942 to shelter 1,500 people, it was struck by a bomb in 1944 that bounced off and exploded beside it.
Though packed with civilians, the structure shook but suffered no damage. The photo featured in this
exhibition was taken by Laguillo in 1986. The Cold War had not yet ended, and every Saturday the bunker’s
siren still sounded—to test functionality and remind the public and the Steingrau (“stone gray” in German), that
is, the East German National People’s Army, of the long gray shadows cast by borders.
Around that same time (1986), Laguillo photographed Görlitzer Park, one of Berlin’s best-known green
spaces, built atop the foundations of the former Görlitzer Bahnhof. Originally opened in 1866, the
station continued to operate despite heavy bombing damage until 1961. The worsening East-West political
divide sealed its fate, rendering its western location untenable for eastern lines: it became a gray zone.
Sometimes, war creates unexpected landscapes—not only from destruction but also from subtle, provisional
sociopolitical transformations. Through stories of victors, vanquished, or mere
witnesses, the history of ruins maps a world of collapsed cities. It is the only way for the gray of ashes
to cut through the rubble of our memory. “Perhaps we seek in the empires of the past a justi cation to create
the present,” wrote German archaeologist Alexander Conze in his letters. In 1878, by order of Bismarck,
Conze purchased the remains of the Pergamon Altar from the Ottoman Empire for 20,000 marks and sent
them to Berlin. He identi ed the fragments by comparing them to a reference in the Roman writer
Lucius Ampelius’ Liber Memorialis, which mentioned an altar of the giants. Like Conze, Laguillo
accompanies his photographs of the Pergamon Altar (2011) and Baalbek (2017) with descriptive texts by
Peter Weiss and Robert Wood. For him, reality, text, and photograph achieve authenticity only when they
complete one another.
Gray also has the remarkable ability to adapt to and re ect its surrounding environment. In nature, it nds
refuge in areas where greens and earthy tones lose dominance—in karst regions, on rocky coasts where little can ourish, or at the edges of mountain
vegetation where color is no longer tolerated. —El Curueño (2017)—It also appears where life is no longer
possible —Vandellós 1 (2019)—or where existence, steeped in gray landscapes and atmospheres, becomes
desert-like. In 2017, Laguillo photographed the town of Utrero (León), hidden behind branches. The town was
expropriated and cut off in 1968 due to the construction of the Porma dam, although it was never
actually ooded. A thousand years of history were wiped out in a stroke. It is no coincidence that Juan
Benet set his rst novel You Shall Return to Region in a ctional territory of León province while working as an
engineer on the Porma project between 1956 and 1965.
Benet created a tragic, mysterious universe populated by characters unable to escape a geographically
embodied fate. Gray challenges our tendency toward absolutes: anyone who seeks to understand shadow
tones enters the in nite realm of nuance.
Cézanne said that nature is not on the surface but in the depths, and that colors are the expression of that
depth on the surface. They rise from the roots of the world. The only two color series in this exhibition—The
Union Mines (1992) and Kennecott Copper Mine, Utah (1989)—exemplify the visible, inorganic side of this
depth: the mineral, the stone. But the polychromatic idyll deceives; as experiºments show, the sum of
individual colors does not yield a luminous tone, but rather a sort of brownish gray. Beneath these vast,
brightly colored open-pit mines lie traces that are hard to imagine: gray imprints. These marks quantify the
environmental damage of water contamination caused by human activity and, despite their ashen name, their effects are terribly colorful. This is why the Union
Mines appear as a kind of telluric landscape where vegetation has not grown on their massive reddish
waste piles since the last century. When it rains or the wind blows, heavy metal residues continue to settle
over the town of Portmán. Where there was once sea, for 33 years now there has only been a broken
ecosystem awaiting regeneration. Likewise, the Kennecott Copper Mine in Utah—one of the largest
mining excavations in the world, visible from space—contains a contaminated groundwater column
covering 190 square kilometers, releasing millions of tons of toxic chemicals annually, including arsenic,
lead, mercury, and others. The gray footprint has a geographic dimension but also a moral one. Whether it
continues to spread like a shroud depends on the gray eminences who are invariably present when opacity is
institutionalized.
Ultimately, the exhibition Manolo Laguillo 1986–2023 presents life as a delicate interplay of light and shadow.
His photographs are instruments of exploration more than proof, maps in the making rather than wise opinions. They are devices that grow from what they do
not yet know, always approached from the present.
The tone that results from adding and subtracting light and shadow in our lives depends, therefore, on the shades of gray with which we choose to qualify our existence.
Manoli Mansilla
Mayo 2025