A Pepper Curls Into Red

A chili pepper curls against the red like a single gesture caught mid motion (paragraph 2: 'bright against the red field around it'), the stem twisting back on itself as if the whole form were coiling with its own heat. There is nothing else in the frame, no table, no kitchen, no context, only the shape itself, isolated and monumental, the way an object becomes a symbol once everything around it is taken away.

No paint, no print, no ink. The image is formed through removal, a field of individual marks worked into the surface of deep red coloured mirror glass until the curve of the pepper emerges as a field of fine scratches, bright against the dark field around it. Seen up close, the body of the pepper dissolves into countless small, directional marks, and only from a distance does it resolve back into a single, fluid line.

Red carries its own charge here. It is the colour of heat and appetite, of warning and desire at once, and setting the pepper into a surface that is itself red lets the material and the subject speak the same language, so the glow of the form seems to rise straight out of the colour it is made from.

Because the ground is mirrored, the room you stand in becomes part of the work. Walls, light fixtures, your own outline slide into the red around the scratched form, so the piece never sits still the way a print does. You are not looking at the pepper from outside, you are looking at it from inside a space that includes you.

The image is always present, in daylight as in gallery spotlighting. Light does not create it, light sharpens it, deepening the contrast and giving the scratched surface more shine and depth as it shifts. What changes with the room is the reflection around the form, never the form itself.

A Pepper Curls Into Red 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. This work is unique.

"Damage, held still, becomes shape, and shape, held in red, becomes feeling."

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.