Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

The building is doing something strange with triangles. Sand-coloured plaster planes cut into wedges, a stepped field of terracotta tile folding to a V across the middle of the frame, and at the bottom an opening that gives onto pale sky and the tops of some trees. At the top, framed in a trapezoid of white light, a woman hangs in rust-red cloth, feet together and pointed toward us, her sleeves still full of the movement, her orange hair flung up and out into a corona.

Which way is up is an open question here, and it stays open. If she is above us then we are lying on our backs on a stone floor. If she is below us then we are leaning over the lip of a well. The architecture offers no help at all, having been photographed from the one angle that takes the horizon out of a building, which is nearly as difficult as taking it out of a sky. She looks straight back down the lens with no expression whatever, and that settles nothing either.

Everything is one colour, or very nearly. The plaster is the colour of dry earth, the tile is the colour of dry earth fired, her clothes are the colour of dry earth wet, and her hair is the hottest point in the frame. A picture built from a single family of warm tones is usually a calm one. This is not calm, because the only living thing in it is the wrong way up and entirely unbothered, and because the whole building appears to have been arranged around the small trapezoid of light she happens to be occupying.