David in the Green

David in the Green brings Michelangelo's most famous head into a material that does not exist in Florence: deep green mirror glass, scratched rather than carved. The three quarter turn is kept intact, the furrowed brow, the marble curls, the gaze fixed somewhere just past the viewer, all of it formed not by addition but by removal, a field of individual marks standing in for centuries of chisel work.

Green carries its own weight here. It is the colour of patina, of bronze and stone that have survived long enough to change colour with age, and it settles over David the way time settles over any monument that has outlasted its own moment. The youth who once stood for a city's defiance now stands inside a colour that speaks of endurance rather than triumph.

No paint, no print, no pigment. The image is scratched into the surface of the coloured mirror glass, and it stays there, present with or without direct light. What light adds is not the picture itself but its depth: under a stronger source the marks catch and hold the light, the contrast deepens, the curls seem to turn in their own shadow. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it.

From across a room the head resolves into something monumental, a single dark and pale mass instantly recognisable. Close up, that certainty dissolves into a field of fine scratches, individual and unruly, that only agree to become a face at a distance. Between those two readings is where the work actually lives.

Because the ground is mirror, not wall, the room keeps entering the piece. Whoever stands in front of David is drawn into the surface around the bust, faintly present among the marks, watched by a face that has itself been watched for five centuries. Looking at the work becomes a way of standing inside it.

David in the Green 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, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part. This work is unique.

"Some faces are carved once and remembered forever. This one is scratched into green, and asks to be looked at again."

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

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