A Mouth Kept in Embers

Out of a darkness that gives nothing away, a mouth surfaces. The lower face is rendered with almost nothing: a curve of white skin, the black weight of parted lips, a suggestion of shadow where a jaw or a cheekbone might be. Everything inessential has been withheld, so the one detail left carries the whole portrait.

Nothing here is applied onto the surface. Every mark that forms the lips, the light along the skin, the depth of the surrounding black, is a controlled scratch cut into coloured mirror glass, in a red so deep it reads almost as embers. There is no paint, no print, no ink; only the surface, worked until a face steps forward from within it.

Red carries the title. A Mouth Kept in Embers names a heat that has not gone out, only banked, and the coloured glass beneath the black and white portrait holds that warmth the way ash holds a coal: present at every angle, never flaring, never cooling.

Around the mouth, and in the untouched glass between each scratch, the room keeps showing itself. Whoever stands in front of this work is drawn into it, caught in the same red field that holds the face, so that looking becomes a kind of closeness the subject seems to invite and withhold at once.

The mouth is present in any light, in full daylight or after the room has gone quiet. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it: under a stronger source the scratches catch and hold, the contrast deepens, the red glows harder around the black. What changes with the room is only the reflection, never the face itself.

From across a room the mouth reads as one whole gesture, monumental in red, black and white. Close up it opens into a dense field of individual scratches, each a small, controlled decision, together holding a mouth that seems to keep its heat and its silence in equal measure.

A Mouth Kept in Embers 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.

"Some fires are kept, not shown."

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

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