Every Screen a Small Sun

Every Screen a Small Sun opens on a city street filled with people, and above the rooftops hangs a total eclipse, the sun reduced to a thin white ring around a black disc, one of the rarest sights the sky can offer.

Almost no one below is watching it. Every face in the crowd tilts down toward a small screen, each one glowing like a private sun held in the palm of a hand. The real light above has been traded for the smaller ones carried in every hand.

Only one figure breaks the pattern: a child standing near the center of the crowd, hands empty, face turned up toward the sky instead of down toward a screen. Everyone around moves in the same rhythm, lit by the same borrowed glow, while the child looks at the one light that is real.

No paint. No print. No ink. The eclipse, the towers and the crowd beneath them are scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, built through controlled surface damage rather than anything laid on top of it. The image exists because material was taken away, not added.

It is always there to see, in daylight or shadow. Light does not create the image, it sharpens it: under a direct source the scratches catch and reflect, the contrast deepens, and the work reads differently from every angle without ever losing the image.

From across a room, the piece is monumental, a whole city holding its breath under a darkened sun. Up close, it dissolves into a quiet field of controlled scratches, each one small on its own, together forming something no single mark could hold.

Every Screen a Small Sun continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, a visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure.

"One real sun in the sky, and a crowd lighting smaller ones instead."

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

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