Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - A Torso Bowed in Embers

A Torso Bowed in Embers holds a single figure caught mid gesture, head lowered, shoulders turning inward, as if listening to something inside itself rather than facing the room. There is no face to read, no name to attach, only the plain fact of a body carrying weight. That absence is the subject. Without a face the torso stops being someone and becomes anyone, a study in what a body does when it has nowhere left to hide.

Nothing here is painted or printed. The image is built by removal, a field of individual marks worked into the surface until muscle, shadow and the fall of light emerge from what has been taken away rather than added. Seen across a room the figure reads as one clear, monumental form. Step closer and that form dissolves into a field of fine scratches, each one part of the whole and none of them the whole on its own.

The glass itself is red, a deep, poured red that never breaks toward the edges of the frame. Red carries its own charge here, the colour of what lies just beneath skin, of exposure and heat, fitting for a figure stripped down to its bare structure and still standing. Embers do not blaze, they hold heat quietly, and that is the register this work chooses.

The scratches are always there, visible in low light as much as bright. Light does not create this image, it sharpens it. Under a direct source the marks catch and lift, the contrast deepens and the figure gains weight and depth, but the image itself never appears or disappears. What changes with the room is only the reflection moving around the figure, never the figure.

Because the surface is mirrored, the wall behind you, the light in your room, your own outline, all settle into the red ground around the scratched body. You are not looking at the work from a safe distance, you are folded into it, standing in the same red field as the figure that bows before you.

A Torso Bowed in Embers 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.

"What is stripped away still stands."

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.