A Body Striped in Silver

A Body Striped in Silver holds a figure caught between visibility and shadow, her torso built entirely from bands of fine scratches that fall across her like light through a half closed blind. The face tips back into darkness, the legs dissolve into the same black ground, and what remains is a body read only in fragments, chest, stomach, the soft turn of a shoulder, each one picked out where the surface has been worked and left to catch the light.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is scratched into the acrylic glass, a field of individual marks laid in parallel bands so the body seems wrapped in stripes of brightness rather than lit by them. At the chest, one band breaks and a small dark shape remains untouched, a single pause in the rhythm, as if the light itself hesitated there.

From across a room the figure reads as a single clear form, monumental in its stillness. Close against the glass, that form breaks apart into a field of fine scratches, a hand worked rhythm of lines that only resolves again as you step back. The image is always present, with or without direct light. Light does not create it, it sharpens it, deepening the contrast and letting the stripes hold their shine.

What is withheld carries as much weight as what is shown. A face turned into shadow, legs that refuse to surface, a body offered only in the parts the light chooses to strike, this is intimacy built from restraint rather than exposure, a presence that stays partly its own even while standing fully bare.

A Body Striped in Silver continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print. It reads differently from different angles, without ever losing the image. This work is unique.

"Some light does not reveal a body. It withholds just enough to keep it hers."

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

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