Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - A Ray Burst Held in Green

Half a kiwi fruit, cut and turned toward the light, becomes something else here: a burst of fine rays held still in deep green mirror glass. What begins as fruit ends as event, a quiet explosion caught mid breath.

The pale core at the centre blazes brightest, a small sun around which everything else organises itself. The ring of seeds stays black, a dark constellation pressed into the glow. Out from that centre run fine bright rays, following the flesh's own structure until they reach the thin, fuzzy rim of the skin, traced in light. Beyond that rim, nothing: a wide, calm margin of green mirror holds the whole burst in silence.

Nothing here was added. The image appears through removal, a field of individual marks scratched into the surface of deep green coloured mirror glass until the kiwi's pale flesh shows through the green. Up close the burst dissolves into a field of fine scratches, seen from across a room it gathers back into one radiant form.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. The scratches are visible by day as by night, direct light only deepens the contrast between the white burst and the black seeds at its core, between the bright rim and the green around it. What changes with the room is never the image itself, only the reflection that moves around and through it.

That reflection is part of the work. Around the kiwi's radiant form, the mirror holds the room and whoever stands before it, so the viewer becomes part of the composition rather than someone looking in from outside. The glass itself is green, the colour of the fruit's own flesh and of growth, of something still alive inside the stillness, and it tints every reflection that crosses the surface with that same quiet life.

An ordinary half fruit, cut open and left to the light, becomes instead a small cosmos: a core of light, a dark ring held close around it, rays reaching toward a rim that barely survives before the dark takes over. It reads like a burst of energy more than a piece of produce, as if cutting the kiwi open released something that wanted to expand.

A Ray Burst Held in Green 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 the smallest thing, cut open and held to the light, can burst."

About Art on Mirror – Green

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 green 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 green. 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 green 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.

Green is the colour of growth, of forests and of things that keep returning. 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.

This listing contains AI-generated visualisations. Please refer to the original photographs to assess the actual condition of the object.