A Stairway Cut From Void

A staircase, cut loose from any ground, is suspended diagonally across a field of absolute black. It bends once, changes direction, and keeps rising, carrying a line of solitary figures who never quite arrive anywhere inside the frame.

There is no floor beneath the stairs, no wall, no horizon, only white stone and black nothing. Each figure walks alone, spaced apart from the next, trailing a shadow back into the dark. Some climb. Some pause mid step. None look toward each other.

No paint. No print. No ink. The staircase and its travelers exist because the surface itself has been taken away: controlled scratches worked directly into the surface of the acrylic glass until this structure emerged from what remains.

The image is always present, in daylight and in shadow alike. Light does not create it. It sharpens it. Under direct light the scratches catch and hold the glow, the contrast deepens, and the work reads differently from every angle, without ever losing its shape.

From across a room, the staircase resolves into one continuous, monumental climb suspended in darkness. Standing close, that certainty breaks apart into a quiet field of controlled surface damage, each mark quiet on its own, essential to the structure as a whole.

It is an old, familiar ache rendered in white stone and void: the sense of climbing without knowing what waits above, in the company of others who are, in the end, each walking entirely alone. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure. This work continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print.

"Everyone climbs. No one climbs together."

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

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