Txema Yeste

We are down at floor level, close to a strip of white ledge that runs across the bottom of the frame, and above it a wall of pure black rises without a seam. Out of the lit floor a single pale filament stands, splits into two thin legs, and lifts, at the top, a blurred crossbar of needles held out like arms. I cannot help seeing a body: a small cruciform figure, or a dancer arrested with both wrists flung wide. It stands where nothing else exists.

What moves me is that the figure is not quite still. The legs are drawn sharp, two clean strokes rooted to the ledge, but the outstretched arms smear sideways into a soft grey ribbon, as if caught turning in a wind I cannot feel. So the picture holds two times at once: the fixed and the fleeting, the standing and the swaying. Against so total a darkness, this thread of a plant becomes unbearably present, lit from the front until each fibre glows. I keep wanting to steady it.

The theatrical black is Yeste’s signature, the lighting of a fashion set turned upon a scrap of dried grass. He belongs to the front rank of Spanish photography, published in Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and the Needles series brings that studio command to the smallest of subjects. This is a gelatin silver print mounted on aluminium Dibond, the process that gives the whites their chalk and the blacks their depthless weight, the two never bleeding into each other. A figure conjured from a filament, and made to stand.