Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Tutankhamun Etched in Firelight

Tutankhamun Etched in Firelight begins with the headdress, and lets everything else stay hidden. The striped nemes rises across the surface as a field of fine scratches, each stripe catching the light like the ribs of gold under a museum lamp, while the cobra and the vulture keep their watch above the brow exactly where three thousand years of ritual placed them.

The face is the work's quiet decision. Where a painter would have added shadow and skin, here nothing is added at all: the cheeks, the mouth, the weight of expression are left as an untouched black oval, a silence at the centre of so much detail. The most famous face in ancient art is withheld from us, and that refusal becomes the real subject of the piece.

Red carries the meaning here. It is the colour of the sun disc Ra rode through the underworld each night, the colour of blood and of the desert that swallowed a boy king's tomb for three thousand years before it gave him back. Scratched into deep red coloured mirror glass, the mask seems to burn rather than shine, as though it were still lit by the torches that once found it in the dark.

No paint, no print, no pigment sits on this surface. The image exists only where the material has been taken away, a field of individual marks that a screen printer's flat black and gold could never hold. Monumental from across a room, it resolves up close into nothing but controlled surface damage and reflected light, structure built by subtraction.

The mirror never lets you stand outside the work. The gallery around it, its walls, its track lights, and your own outline settle into the red surface between the scratches, so that looking at Tutankhamun means finding yourself looking back from inside his headdress. Light does not create this image. It sharpens it, deepening the contrast without ever making the mask appear or vanish, so the pharaoh keeps his hold on the room whether the lights are raised or low.

This piece 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.

"Even a god king keeps one face he will not show you."

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.