Why Coco Dávez is in the Design 100

Coco Dávez is the professional name of Madrid-born, self-taught artist Valeria Palmeiro, and her work turns on a single, disciplined device: a recognisable face — a hairstyle, a silhouette, a signature garment — rendered as a few blocks of flat colour with the features painted out entirely. The technique arrived almost by accident, when a portrait of Patti Smith went wrong and she covered the face in red rather than start again. It has since become the throughline of a decade of painting built around the same dare: remove the one thing a portrait usually depends on, and see how much still reads.

The results have travelled well beyond Spain. Her debut UK show, Faceless, sold out at Maddox Gallery in London in 2019, and a second solo exhibition, Partners in Time, followed there in 2023, pairing off real and fictional couples in the same flattened style. Along the way the work has shown in Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon and Brussels among other cities — proof that a portrait can still function as a portrait once nearly everything specific about a face has been stripped away.