A waterline behaves like a stage here. Underfoot, where wet sand should be, there is a black mirror; beyond it, two waves break in patient sequence like painted flats, and the sky has been sanded into blue haze. Everything in this littoral is blue, the sea, the knit, the skin, and at its edge Jan Baiboon lies curled on her side, eyes closed, head pillowed on her folded hands, asleep in a place that cannot quite exist.
This is the directorial mode at full confidence. Nothing here is found: the ribbed knit sheathes her from wrist to ankle like a second, softer sea; her face carries patches of white cream, part balm, part plaster, part moonlight; her reflection floats beneath her in the polished floor like a body of water she has just left. The picture proposes the sea less as a location than as a state one might wear. Its title speaks of wishes, and the image keeps that promise by refusing every document-like fact, offering instead the cool, continuous logic of a dream that has been art-directed down to the last breaking wave.
Water is one of the elements that recur through his work, alongside fire, sand and wind-blown cloth; Barcelona-born, he has carried that elemental vocabulary through the pages of Vogue, Numéro and Harper’s Bazaar. As an archival pigment print the picture holds this single colour with unusual stamina: a continuous field of blues, running from milk to ink, and deep enough to sleep in.
A waterline behaves like a stage here. Underfoot, where wet sand should be, there is a black mirror; beyond it, two waves break in patient sequence like painted flats, and the sky has been sanded into blue haze. Everything in this littoral is blue, the sea, the knit, the skin, and at its edge Jan Baiboon lies curled on her side, eyes closed, head pillowed on her folded hands, asleep in a place that cannot quite exist.
This is the directorial mode at full confidence. Nothing here is found: the ribbed knit sheathes her from wrist to ankle like a second, softer sea; her face carries patches of white cream, part balm, part plaster, part moonlight; her reflection floats beneath her in the polished floor like a body of water she has just left. The picture proposes the sea less as a location than as a state one might wear. Its title speaks of wishes, and the image keeps that promise by refusing every document-like fact, offering instead the cool, continuous logic of a dream that has been art-directed down to the last breaking wave.
Water is one of the elements that recur through his work, alongside fire, sand and wind-blown cloth; Barcelona-born, he has carried that elemental vocabulary through the pages of Vogue, Numéro and Harper’s Bazaar. As an archival pigment print the picture holds this single colour with unusual stamina: a continuous field of blues, running from milk to ink, and deep enough to sleep in.