A Stair Falls Upward

Two towers face each other across a fall that should not work. A staircase leaves the first at its highest point, drops in one long diagonal all the way to the ground, and somehow arrives at the second tower exactly as high as where it started. The eye follows every step and still cannot explain the climb.

No paint. No print. No ink. The stair, the crenellations, the long diagonal line of the fall exist because the surface has been taken away, a field of fine scratches worked into acrylic glass until each step holds its own edge of light, falling and rising in the same unbroken gesture.

The image is always present in the acrylic glass, in full daylight as much as under a single trained lamp. Light does not create what you see here. It sharpens it, so that under a direct source the stair gathers more shine and the fall reads sharper, while from another angle the same structure settles into something quieter, closer to a thought you are still working out.

From across a room the two towers and the stair between them read as one impossible silhouette, pale architecture cut whole out of the dark. Walk closer and that certainty dissolves into controlled surface damage, a field of individual marks that only agrees to be a staircase again once you step back.

Beneath the geometry sits a familiar feeling, the step that should bring you down and somehow leaves you no lower than before, the long day that ends back at the same landing it began. A Stair Falls Upward does not resolve that feeling, it just builds a place sturdy enough to hold it.

A Stair Falls Upward belongs to Look Twice, 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 letting a single descent arrive exactly as high as it began.

"Some stairs are not built to take you anywhere. They are built so you keep walking."

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