Before Choosing a Face

Before Choosing a Face is a contemporary artwork about identity, concealment, and the moment before we decide who to present to the world.

A single human figure stands before a wall of elegant, blank masks. No expression. No urgency. Only the pause before the choice, and the quiet weight that pause carries.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image emerges through controlled surface damage on acrylic glass. As the viewer moves, light shifts across the surface, drawing the figure and the masks between clarity and absence. From a distance, the composition reads as still and monumental. Up close, the surface reveals itself as a field of controlled scratches, each one a small act of removal rather than addition.

There is something quietly personal in the image. We all carry a collection of faces, worn for different rooms, different people, different versions of ourselves. The masks here are not frightening. They are familiar. That is what makes the moment so precise.

The blank surface of each mask echoes the state of the acrylic glass before the work began. Both are open. Both become something only through what is taken away.

This work continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure.

"Before the face is chosen, there is a moment of complete freedom."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

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