Txema Yeste

A tiny knot of tangled fibres, where the needles leave the cone, is the thing I keep returning to. Everything else here performs grace: two long pine needles spring from a scaled cone and arc across the pale field like the tracks of something thrown, one bow higher, one lower. But at the base the same needles dissolve into a fan of frayed hairs, splayed flat along a rough plaster ledge. The composure of the arc and the ruin of the fringe belong to a single object.

I find the arcs almost too elegant, calligraphic, a signature against grey. It is the shredded end that holds me, that small disorder where the fibres come apart into a dozen weightless threads. Here the plant stops being a diagram and becomes a body: dried, split, faintly obscene as it unravels. The cone at the left, dark and armoured with its overlapping scales, anchors the whole gesture, a heavy head from which these long thoughts escape. Light falls evenly, refusing drama, so the drama is entirely the needle’s own.

The Needles series gathers such fragments and gives them the seriousness of portraiture. Yeste, one of the leading figures of Spanish fashion photography, working for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, brings to a pine’s cast-off the same attention he lends the human form, an elemental instinct for wind, fibre and line. The print is gelatin silver mounted on aluminium Dibond, its tones ranging from the deep near-black of the cone to the milk of the ground, the frayed hairs held in silver so fine you feel you could disturb them. A small thing, kept.