Frida in the Green

Frida Kahlo needs no name plate. The braided crown of flowers, the joined brows, the direct gaze, one look is enough. In Frida in the Green, that face is not painted or printed. It is shaped as a field of individual marks in deep green coloured mirror glass, so the image seems to rise out of the surface itself.

The hair, the brows, the flowers at her ears and the pattern of her blouse gather into bright, fine light against a mirror that otherwise stays a deep, quiet green. Around that light the face holds its shadow, the parts left untouched receding into colour, dark and still. The image lives in that difference, in what is allowed to shine and what is left to hold its silence.

Green carries its own charge here. It is the colour of growth and of the garden she returned to again and again, the colour of a life insisted upon in spite of pain, and it settles around her portrait like the quiet in a room after everything else has been said.

Because the surface is coloured mirror glass, the room around the work is never absent from it. Walls, other paintings, the people walking past, all of it settles into the green between and around the marks, so that whoever stands in front of Frida in the Green becomes, for a moment, part of her portrait too.

The image does not wait for light to exist. It is there in a quiet room as much as under a single directed beam, always present in the surface. Light does not create it, it sharpens it. Under a stronger light the field of marks catches and gathers, the contrast deepens, the reflection around her shifts while the portrait itself holds its ground.

Frida 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.

"She looked back long before anyone dared to truly look at her."

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

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