Scarface

Scarface is a contemporary artwork about ambition, its price, and the stillness at the top where no one else is left.

The face is frontal, monumental, and quiet. Heavy lidded eyes look down at nothing. The brow is lit, the mouth set, the cheeks carrying the weight of a man who got everything he demanded and is now alone in the room with it. This is not the shouting icon of the posters. It is the moment after, the empire builder listening to his own silence.

No paint. No print. No ink. The portrait appears through controlled surface damage on acrylic glass. The lit planes of the face are dense with fine scratches, the eye sockets stay in untouched shadow, and as the viewer moves the expression seems to shift between resolve and exhaustion. From a distance the face has the authority of a monument. Step closer and it breaks into countless marks, a surface that looks scarred because it is.

The medium is the metaphor here, and it is not subtle about it. A man defined by his scar, built entirely from damage. What the work adds is the quietness. Every ambition this size ends in a room like this darkness, with a face like this one, lit from above and answering to no one.

Scarface 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.

"At the top there is only the dark to talk to."

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

Questions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.