Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 1972

The backdrop is sky — a deep, saturated dusk-blue scumbled with a few thin clouds, the kind of painted or photographed firmament that announces itself as a studio decision rather than a window onto weather. Against it the light falls cool and even, modelling a bare shoulder into the lower frame so that the body becomes a smooth dark mass, an almost sculptural plinth turned toward us before the face above it resolves.

And the face is where the staging declares its strategy. A seam of gold runs the vertical meridian of the head — down the centre of the forehead, along the bridge of the nose, pooling on the lips — with further strokes laid across the eyelids and brows. This is the constructed image working as ritual object: the model held frontal and close, chin lowered, eyes lidded and turned slightly down, so that she reads less as a sitter than as an effigy or a mask come to the threshold of waking. The gilding is not decoration applied to a portrait; it is the picture's whole proposition, the line that converts a body into an icon.

Made in 2014 from the Tenerife work, this sits inside the practice that has placed its maker among the most ambitious image-builders to come out of Spanish fashion photography — the tableau treated as a place where adornment, sculpture and the studied artifice of the beauty sitting collapse into a single charged surface. Issued across three scales and processes, from the intimate dye-transfer print to the largest chromogenic, the work asks to be read the way contemporary photography asks it: as a deliberate position, fully aware of the glamour it borrows and the older, graver register of gold and the human face it reaches toward.