Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - The Iris Set Ablaze

There is a moment before recognition, when an eye is still just a shape, and this work lives exactly there. A single gaze, drawn monumental and comic book bold, fills the surface almost edge to edge, the lashes radiating outward like a burst of light around a centre that refuses to look away.

Nothing here is printed or painted. The lashes, the rim of the lid, the fine radial lines of the iris, all of it exists because material was taken away, not added. Controlled scratches open the surface of the deep red coloured mirror glass, and where the glass stays untouched it holds the darkness, dense and unbroken, so the eye seems to rise directly out of the void around it.

Red is not a background choice here, it is the temperature of the whole piece. It is the flush of a look held a beat too long, the warmth just under the skin of a feeling that has not yet been named, the colour a gaze turns when it is finally set ablaze rather than merely open.

Up close, the eye dissolves into a field of individual marks, thin, deliberate, catching whatever light finds them. Step back and they resolve again into lash, lid and iris, whole and watching. The image is always there, present in the glass itself, and light does not create it. It sharpens it, deepening the contrast without ever making the eye appear or disappear.

Because the surface is mirrored, the room around it, and the person standing in front of it, are pulled into the reflection between the scratches. You do not simply look at this eye. For a moment, it looks back with your own face caught inside it, and looking becomes a kind of exchange rather than a one way act.

The Iris Set Ablaze continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part. This work is unique.

"An eye that does not close, in a red that does not cool."

About Art on Mirror – Red

Art on Mirror is a body of work in which the image is scratched into coloured mirror glass, and the world in front of the work becomes part of it. Every line is cut into a deep red mirrored surface of acrylic glass. The scratches are always there, bright against the colour, while the surface around them keeps reflecting the room, the daylight and the person looking.

From a distance the image reads clear and complete, a pale figure held in a field of red. Step closer and the work opens into a delicate web of individual marks, fine and deliberate, each one essential to the whole. Behind and between them the mirror does what a mirror does. It carries the room and the viewer into the composition, so the surroundings in the work change with the place where it hangs, while the image itself stays firmly in place.

Light does not create the image. It sharpens it. The red ground absorbs and reflects, the scratched lines catch and hold, and under a focused spotlight the contrast deepens until the figure takes on a sculptural, almost luminous quality. In softer light the colour comes forward and the work settles into a quieter register, without ever losing its subject.

Red is the colour of blood, of fire and of everything we cannot stay calm about. That is the emotional ground every work in this series is set against, and the subjects are chosen to belong to it.

Art on Mirror continues the scratched imagery of Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma on a new ground. Where the black works draw their power from absence, these draw it from reflection. The viewer is no longer only looking at the work. The viewer is in it.

About the Artist

My name is Tijs Dragtsma, founder of TD Fine Art Studio.

As an artist, I am driven by a constant desire to explore new visual languages. I do not see art as a fixed style, but as an evolving field of discovery where material, structure, light and emotion come together.

My work often begins with a simple question. How can a material speak in a new way. How can hardness become intimacy. How can precision create emotion. That search lies at the heart of everything I create.

Within TD Fine Art Studio, each body of work is approached as its own world, with its own logic, atmosphere and visual identity. Some works are built through rhythm, repetition and structure. Others emerge through absence, shadow, reflection or tension. What connects them is a shared commitment to originality, clarity and emotional presence.

I am fascinated by contrast. Between strength and fragility. Between control and feeling. Between what is visible and what is left open to interpretation. My goal is not simply to make an image, but to create a work that holds attention, invites reflection and continues to reveal itself over time.

TD Fine Art Studio is the space in which these explorations come together. It is not only a studio, but an evolving artistic universe shaped by curiosity, precision and the ambition to create work that feels distinctive, intentional and alive.