This series comprises eight large-format black-and-white photographs of agency models, chosen as the basis, the raw material for the laboratory process that followed. Each one is named after a brush used to paint and apply make-up, and after the equivalent digital retouching tools found in image-processing software. Brushes and pigments applied the make-up in the spirit of tribal painting, or in a kind of initiatory rite. The models’ faces are simply supports here, reduced to mere surface. The pose is neutral and the gaze absent, as if trained on the woman’s own inner life. The expression is exteriorised only by the paint, which is imposed on the model, its passive recipient. Each portrait has its own pictorial style, which differs from one model to another. It is placed against a digital ground that repeats the pictorial motif of the face. Sometimes overlapping, this ground adds to the abstraction of an image whose only depth is on the inside.