Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

A head and shoulders in black, with no features whatever. In place of a face there is a system of fine bright lines, concentric, running in patient orbits from the crown down over the brow, around where a cheek would be, down the throat and out across the shoulders. Between the lines the black gives nothing back. At the left of the face the rings tighten and tighten and close on a single point, the way the rings of a fingerprint close, or a knot in sawn wood.

The title says what you are looking at: silver metal over black methacrylate, made after a painting by Pavel Tchelitchew. So this is not a photograph of a person. It is a photograph of a manufactured object, a sheet of plastic scored so that the scoring catches light. Everything reading as skin here is a groove with a burr on it. The picture works because a lens cannot tell the difference between a cheekbone turning into shadow and a machined edge doing exactly the same thing.

Tchelitchew drew heads as though they were maps of their own interiors. Yeste has made the map physical and then let ordinary studio light behave normally on it, and that is where the unease comes from. The surface obeys every rule a face obeys. It rounds, it catches, it falls away at the jaw. It simply has nobody inside. The whorl where an eye should be is the one place the system admits to being a system, and once you have seen it you will not look anywhere else.