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Txema Yeste

Spanish, b. 1972
Grace, Bahamas, 2016
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

Twisting away, the body declines to be a portrait and becomes something else: a ridge, a headland, a dark architecture set between two blues. One arm, sheathed to the shoulder in a metallic striped sleeve, extends across the frame like a beam; the other hangs bare, fingers slack. The head all but vanishes behind the rise of a shoulder, and oiled skin gathers the sun until the figure reads as polished bronze against sea and sky.

Photography has long enjoyed steering the figure toward abstraction — the nude as dune, the limb as still life — and fashion complicates the game, since something must remain to be sold. Here that something is a single spectacular sleeve, which anchors the picture to commerce while everything around it behaves like sculpture. The horizon divides turquoise from cobalt with the neatness of a studio backdrop; the location becomes a set, less a place than a steady supply of blue.

The title offers a first name and an island; the image abstracts both. As an editorial picture it presents a garment; as a photograph it withholds the face fashion usually demands, offering topography instead. Yeste holds the two registers open at once, and the sleeve — catching light like crumpled foil — is the hinge on which the whole image swings.

Grace, Bahamas