Merlijne seems to surface from a nocturnal tide, half‑claimed by the water and half by the distant city that looms behind her. New York appears as a wavering apparition, its skyline flattened into trembling silhouettes and soft haloes of light.

The towers glow without ever fully resolving, like an afterimage on the paper, and between this monumental geometry and the liquid foreground the body becomes a fragile hinge where two incompatible worlds briefly meet.

Her posture carries a precise, almost cinematic tension: shoulders turning toward us while the face withdraws into deliberate anonymity. With biography withheld, Merlijne becomes a distilled presence, an archetype rather than a character. Identity slips below the surface, leaving the arc of the collarbone, the glint of droplets on skin, the black band of fabric holding the body as the only available clues. The frozen splash at the lower edge suggests both arrival and retreat, the undecided second before choosing to inhabit this city‑dream or to refuse it altogether.

Water is the covert protagonist, a dark mirror that pulls the skyline into unstable reflections. Vertical certainties dissolve as towers stretch and blur around her moving arm, dragging architecture into a realm of flux and sensation. The pool becomes a provisional ocean where the metropolis is rehearsed as memory, seductive yet suspect.

Light sculpts everything with a sharp, almost cutting contrast. The black‑and‑white palette denies the softness of color and insists on texture: wet skin, velvet shadows, metallic edges of buildings. Time feels condensed, as if an entire sequence has been compressed into a single, suspended frame.

Txema Yeste’s photograph invites lingering, holding the gaze at the unstable threshold between immersion and escape, intimacy and spectacle, body and city.