Psyche Wakes in Light

Two strokes of light rise like wings from a knot of brightness at the center, and at the center of that knot, where two faces should almost touch, the dark stays dark. The kiss itself is the one thing the work keeps for itself, held back in a core of near-black while everything around it, the arms, the lifted wings, the long fall of drapery beneath her, is given over to a field of fine scratches.

This is after Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, the marble carved by Antonio Canova and finished in 1793, now held in the Louvre in Paris. Canova set the story at its single most charged second, the moment a kiss wakes Psyche from the death that fell on her the instant she opened a box she had been warned never to open. This is an independent work by Tijs Dragtsma, a new interpretation in scratches and not a copy, reproduction or print of Canova's sculpture.

What the original is loved for is that it turns stone into breath, the hardest material made to carry the softest instant, her arms curving up to circle his head before she has even opened her eyes, his wings thrown high as if startled by his own tenderness. The whole sculpture is built on that cross of gestures, reaching toward reaching, and almost nothing else.

What survives here is that cross entire: the lift of the wings, the arc of her arms finding his head, the long reclining weight of her body and the drapery gathered beneath it. What is given up is the marble itself, its cool white weight, the pedestal, the gallery light that usually falls on it in Paris. All of it surrenders to one black field, so that only the reaching, and the kiss it is reaching toward, remain as light.

Psyche Wakes in Light belongs to After the Masters, a series within Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, and in which that same damage becomes a way of asking how little of a masterpiece the eye still needs before it knows the whole, and what a familiar embrace looks like once everything but the reach of it is let go.

No paint. No print. No ink. The figures are held in a field of individual marks scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, always present, never waiting for light to call them into being. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it, and the dark at the center of the embrace stays exactly where Canova first carved it, a kiss the work still will not quite show.

"Some revivals happen in the open. This one happens just out of reach of the light."

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