Txema Yeste

Giacometti spent a lifetime whittling the human figure down toward nothing, and here two pine needles have gone and finished the job for him: joined at their little dark knot of a head, legs planted on a white floor, mid-stride, carrying a third needle across their shoulders like a tightrope walker’s pole. Calder would have claimed the balancing act; Picasso, who could make a bull from handlebars, would have recognized the trick of it. The needles, for their part, remain needles.

The question that keeps me here is practical: how does it stand? The two points touch the floor with the daintiness of a dancer testing cold water, and a small grey shadow pools at each foot, which suggests genuine contact, genuine weight, insofar as a needle can be said to weigh. There is a faint seam where the white floor meets the white wall, so the figure has a stage, a horizon, a world. Whether it balanced for a tenth of a second or an afternoon is the picture’s secret, and like all good secrets it improves with keeping.

Txema Yeste made his name filling pages with spectacle for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, so this hush feels earned rather than austere: a maximalist proving how little he needs. The elements that blow through his fashion work, wind, sand, water, fire, are here reduced to two needles and a shadow. Printed in gelatin silver and mounted on aluminium Dibond, the whites go on forever and the needle stays sharp. Somewhere Giacometti’s walkers are still walking. This one, lighter than any of them, has stopped to let us look.