Patience Wears Scales

"Patience Wears Scales" begins with a single creature holding still. A chameleon grips a bare branch in a deep black void, its body curled inward, its tail wound tight, and one eye turned fully toward you. Nothing else survives in the frame, no leaves, no ground, no horizon, only the animal and the dark, and the quiet insistence of being watched back.

Green carries the subject here. It is the colour of the chameleon's skin, the colour of its old trick of disappearing into the world around it, and in this work it refuses to hide anything. Cast into deep green coloured mirror glass, it becomes the colour of stillness held on purpose, of a creature that could vanish and chooses, instead, to stay in full view.

Nothing here is painted onto the surface, nothing is printed across it. The chameleon, the branch, the single watching eye, all of it is drawn out of the coloured mirror glass through controlled scratches, a shape built by what has been taken away rather than by what has been added.

Seen from across a room, the image reads whole and calm, an animal caught between breaths on its branch. Move closer and that same stillness resolves into a field of controlled surface damage, mark beside mark, none of them the picture on its own, all of them together holding the eye that holds you.

Around and between those marks, the mirror keeps working. The room behind you, and your own outline, settle into the green glass alongside the chameleon, so that whoever stands in front of the piece is folded into it. You do not only look at the work, you appear inside it, sharing the dark with the creature that is already looking back.

The chameleon never leaves. It holds its place in the glass in daylight and in shadow alike. Light does not create the image, it sharpens it, deepening the contrast along every scratch until the branch, the curled tail and that fixed eye come forward with more shine and more depth. Walk the room and the reflection around the work shifts. The image itself does not.

"Patience Wears Scales" 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.

"It does not hide. It has simply been waiting for you to notice how long it was already looking."

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

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