← Txema Yeste Close ×

Txema Yeste

Spanish, b. 1972
Orange Nest, Nyakong, 2023
Archival Pigment Print.
20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm
30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm
40 x 60 in / 101 x 152 cm
59 x 76 3/4 in / 150 x 195 cm
Hand-signed by artist, mounted, titled, editioned and print date in ink label affixed to mount verso
Edition of 5 — 20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm
Edition of 5 — 30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm
Edition of 3 — 40 x 60 in / 101 x 152 cm
Edition of 1 — 59 x 76 3/4 in / 150 x 195 cm
© The Artist

Orange is the whole event here, an orange that does not sit on surfaces but seems to come from behind them, as if the light had been sewn inside the clothes. It saturates a sculptured dress with peaked shoulders and a nipped waist, then spills into the translucent plastic flanking her, coil upon coil of clear tubing lit to the amber of a struck match. Above it all a cool blue washes the crown of her bowed head, and her curled lashes and painted lips glow like filaments.

Everything wants to be understood as substance. The dress reads as dense and matte, the plastic as wet and refractive, the skin, caught between the warm underlight and the blue from above, becoming a third material. This is a photograph aware that fashion is made of stuff, of fibers and polymers and heat, and that a body inside it is a thing among things. The title calls the plastic a nest, and the coils cradle her, glowing, as though she were incubated by her own garment.

Yeste, a leader of Spanish fashion photography seen across Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, has always chased the elements, and here fire is conjured without a flame, only orange plastic and clever light. The archival pigment print is the crucial vessel, holding that molten glow at the edge of blowing out, keeping the deep black from swallowing the tubes, preserving the exact temperature where warm meets cool on her cheek. Held in the hand, the print keeps burning quietly, a fire that will not go out.

Orange Nest, Nyakong