Big Bear in Blue

Big Bear in Blue takes one of childhood's smallest pleasures and blows it up into something monumental. A single gummy bear, soft, rounded, otherwise unassuming, stands alone in a deep black void, drawn in thick white contour lines against the dark, playful and monumental at once. Its candy sweetness is gone, replaced by a quiet, glowing presence that commands the whole room.

The image does not sit on top of the surface. It is cut into deep blue coloured mirror glass through controlled scratches, a field of fine marks that catch and hold the light. Along one shoulder and down one flank, coarse white halftone dots thicken into a glossy highlight, the only hint of roundness on a body that otherwise stays dark and unlit.

Blue carries the mood of the piece. It cools the warmth we expect from something so sweet and familiar, turning a nostalgic object into something closer to a relic, suspended and a little strange, as if remembered rather than eaten.

Because the surface is mirrored, the room enters the work too. Whoever stands in front of it sees their own outline folding into the blue around the bear's silhouette, caught for a moment inside the same darkness the figure stands in.

The bear is always there, present in the glass whether the room is bright or dim. Light does not create the image, it sharpens it: under a direct beam the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, while the reflection around the figure keeps shifting with the room.

Big Bear in Blue 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, where a familiar shape is stripped down to what was taken away, and looking is never just looking.

"A giant built from nothing but the marks left behind."

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

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