A Rocket Exhales Into Dark

Kim Jong-un looks up at the one thing in the frame he cannot command. This is satire: an invented scene and an opinion made visible, not a report. The missile that answers to no one else's schedule has become, for the length of this image, a toy losing its breath on a string.

In the finished work the balloon keeps everything the man is losing. No paint and no print, only a field of fine scratches worked into the acrylic glass, dense enough at the nose cone and the painted porthole to catch real light, so the object reads before the figure does, exactly as a toy is built to be noticed first.

The string pulls the eye straight down to the hand that holds it, built with the same close attention, knuckles and grip worked into their own small knot of light. Between balloon and fist nothing else is given, so the thin taut line becomes the one connection the image allows between a man and the thing he is watching fail.

His face survives as a quieter field, brow, cheekbone and the set of the mouth held just enough to be read, the collar and shoulder thinning into scattered marks that give out before they reach the rest of the coat. Chest, arm and the long fall of the jacket below are returned almost entirely to black, a silhouette standing guard over a face it is no longer willing to fully illuminate.

A balloon has no engine, no warhead, no schedule, only air, and air is the one thing that always finds its way out. The image asks what is left of a threat once its shape depends on something as ordinary as breath, and lets the leader keep watching long after there is nothing left to watch rise.

A Rocket Exhales Into Dark belongs to Heads of State, 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 catching power at the exact moment its own symbols stop performing for it.

"A rocket that only ever had air to lose."

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