A March Blind to Itself

A column of men moves across the acrylic glass, each one in the same suit, the same stride, the same blindfold pulled tight over the eyes. No paint. No print. The men are shaped in the surface through controlled scratches, a field of individual marks that resolves, from a distance, into a body walking in step, and up close opens back into a field of fine scratches.

Suits are the uniform of men who are paid to see clearly and choose well. Here that costume is turned inside out. Every man in the column wears a blindfold, and none of them seem to mind. They do not need to see where they are going, because the man beside them is walking too, and that has become reason enough.

It is a quiet picture of trust that was never asked to prove itself. A march is already an agreement to move together, but a blind march is something else, a willingness to be carried by rhythm alone. The covered eye stops asking questions, and the body keeps walking regardless.

The scratches that build the column catch the light along the blindfolds and the crossing of the legs, the places where the men are most clearly repeated. Light does not create this image, it sharpens it, the contrast deepening as the angle shifts, the column reading differently depending on where the viewer stands, though the march itself never stops.

Anyone who has followed a policy without reading it, signed where they were told to sign, or kept walking because the row beside them did, will recognise something of themselves in this column. The work does not point at one man. It points at the line, and at how easily a line forms once enough people agree not to look.

A March Blind to Itself belongs to In Plain Sight, a series within Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, and in which that same damage becomes a way of showing how easily a crowd surrenders its own sight for the comfort of moving in step with everyone beside it.

A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure. In a column with no leader, that structure is the only thing still standing.

"A crowd with its eyes closed still finds its way forward, as long as no one stops to look."

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