A wide black hat with an enormous undulating brim, worn over a black hood that covers the hair and wraps the throat. Below it a black dress with sharply raised shoulders and a visible corset structure across the bodice. The face is almost the only skin in the picture, and over its upper half — from the brow to just below the eyes — a rectangle of electric blue has been sprayed, dense at the centre and fading at the edges. The eyes are closed. The ground behind is a plain cool grey.
The silhouette does the first work: hat, hood and shoulder line combine into a shape nearer to architecture than to dress, and the composition sets it slightly off-centre against an empty field so that the outline is read as an outline. Then the blue interrupts it. Sprayed rather than drawn, edgeless, following none of the anatomy beneath, it converts the eyes — the part of a portrait that carries the sitter — into a band of colour.
The device recurs throughout Yeste's studio portraiture of the last decade: a panel of pigment laid across a face, quoting the painted masks of theatre and of ritual without belonging to either, and always mis-registered on purpose. What is particular here is the pairing with the hat. Between the brim above and the sprayed blue below, the sitter is concealed twice over, and the picture becomes an arrangement in which a shape and a colour agree to occupy the place where an expression would normally be.
A wide black hat with an enormous undulating brim, worn over a black hood that covers the hair and wraps the throat. Below it a black dress with sharply raised shoulders and a visible corset structure across the bodice. The face is almost the only skin in the picture, and over its upper half — from the brow to just below the eyes — a rectangle of electric blue has been sprayed, dense at the centre and fading at the edges. The eyes are closed. The ground behind is a plain cool grey.
The silhouette does the first work: hat, hood and shoulder line combine into a shape nearer to architecture than to dress, and the composition sets it slightly off-centre against an empty field so that the outline is read as an outline. Then the blue interrupts it. Sprayed rather than drawn, edgeless, following none of the anatomy beneath, it converts the eyes — the part of a portrait that carries the sitter — into a band of colour.
The device recurs throughout Yeste's studio portraiture of the last decade: a panel of pigment laid across a face, quoting the painted masks of theatre and of ritual without belonging to either, and always mis-registered on purpose. What is particular here is the pairing with the hat. Between the brim above and the sprayed blue below, the sitter is concealed twice over, and the picture becomes an arrangement in which a shape and a colour agree to occupy the place where an expression would normally be.