A Berry Traced in Red

"A Berry Traced in Red" holds a single strawberry as a field of individual marks, scratched rather than painted into the surface of deep red mirror glass. The crown and the seeds emerge first, gathered dense and certain where the light would naturally fall, while the lower curve of the fruit lets go, thinning into the mirror until it is almost gone.

That imbalance carries the piece. One side of the strawberry is fully drawn, its contour firm, its skin dense with fine white marks. The other side is barely sketched, the same fruit held in two states at once, fully present and quietly fading, as if it remembers being whole.

Red carries its own weight here. It is the colour of the ripened fruit itself, but pressed into mirror glass it turns into something closer to desire or warning, a colour that pulls the eye before the shape does.

Nothing is added to this surface. No paint, no print, no ink. What you see is the absence left where the material has been taken away, a field of fine scratches standing in for pigment.

Because this is coloured mirror glass, the room keeps entering the picture. Whoever stands in front of it is folded into the red behind the fruit, and the space around the strawberry keeps shifting even while the marks themselves stay exactly where they were placed.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. Under a direct beam the scratches catch and hold, the contrast deepens and the seeds seem to lift off the surface, but the strawberry was always there, in the dark as much as in the light.

This work 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.

"Half kept, half let go, and red enough to remember."

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

Questions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.