A Cluster of Borrowed Faces

A figure stands before a row of closed doors, one hand already reaching for the nearest handle. But the head above that hand is not a single face. It is a cluster of white masks, stacked and overlapping, each one carrying a different expression, calm, amused, distant, unreadable. Which face will step through the door is not yet decided.

No paint. No print. No ink. Every mask, every fold of fabric, every closed door is scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, built through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print.

The image is always present, visible even in a still, unlit room. Under direct light the scratches catch and reflect, and the contrast deepens, the faces stepping forward out of the dark. It reads differently from every angle, without ever losing the image. Light does not create the picture here. It sharpens it.

From across a room the work reads as one dark, monumental shape, a figure caught mid decision. Move closer and that certainty dissolves into a field of fine scratches, into a crowd of individual faces, none of which belong to the body beneath them.

The subject is a familiar kind of performance, the selection of an expression to wear before opening the next door: professional, warm, guarded, amused, whichever face the room seems to ask for. The masks are less a disguise than a wardrobe, worn and exchanged so often that the person underneath becomes difficult to locate.

A Cluster of Borrowed Faces continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print.

"Every door asks the same quiet question: which face is actually yours?"

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

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