Horns Drawn From Fire

Horns Drawn From Fire begins where the bull disappears into its own darkness, its lowered head and the mass of its body given as one unlit form, so the animal reads less as something observed and more as something remembered, a shape held at the edge of visibility.

Only the outline survives as anything close to light, a thin halo that hugs the animal's edge and dies again within reach, and along the curve of the horns two fine bright lines that seem to have been drawn straight out of embers. Nothing else is given. No ground, no floor, no wall, only the animal and the dark that keeps it.

The image is not applied onto the surface of the mirror, it is opened into it, formed through a field of controlled scratches worked into deep red coloured mirror glass, so that what glows is not paint or print but the material itself catching light along its wound.

Red carries its own charge here, the colour of blood kept warm under the skin, of heat that has not yet become flame.

Because the surface is mirror as much as image, the room and whoever stands before it are pulled into the red around the horns and the dark of the body. The work is never finished by the wall it hangs on, it is finished by the person who steps close enough to be caught inside it.

From across a room the bull is monumental, a single dark mass with horns lit like a warning. Up close that same mass resolves into a field of individual marks, patient and exact, proof that the image was taken away rather than added. Light does not create it, it only sharpens what was already there, and the reflection may change with the room, but the image stays.

Horns Drawn From Fire 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.

"The fire is not around the bull. It is what the bull is made of."

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