Stairs Without Up or Down

Six people climb six staircases inside the same room, one on every wall, one on the ceiling, one underfoot, and every one of them is certain the climb is heading up. None of them is wrong. None of them is right either. The cube holds all six directions at once, calm and plainly lit, as if contradiction were simply how this particular room works.

The staircases meet nowhere and belong to no single floor, yet the room reads as whole from any corner, a six sided box with the ordinary comfort of a hallway and none of its ordinary rules. Each figure keeps their eyes on their own treads. None looks up, or down, to where the others are walking along what should, by any shared logic, be a wall.

Nothing here was painted, printed or drawn. The cube, its six stairways and the six small figures climbing them exist because the acrylic glass has lost part of its surface, a field of fine scratches shaped into risers, corners and the long throw of shadow beneath each step.

The image is always there, in daylight as much as under a single trained lamp. Light does not create what you see here, it sharpens it. Under a direct source the stairs deepen and gather their own shine, under a softer angle the same cube settles into something quieter and more distant, it reads differently from different angles, without ever losing the image.

From across a room the cube reads as one calm architectural object, a box of light holding six figures paused mid climb. Close in, that certainty breaks apart into a field of individual marks, a surface that only resolves back into stairs and walls and walking people once the eye steps away again.

Each of the six is convinced the other five have their gravity wrong. It is a small, almost comic disagreement, and also an old one, everyone measures up and down from wherever they happen to be standing. Look long enough and the room stops being a puzzle about staircases and starts asking a quieter question about your own.

Stairs Without Up or Down belongs to Look Twice, 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 holding the patience and the quiet comedy of continuing to climb in a world that refuses to add up. The work is inspired by M. C. Escher and is an original composition, returning to a single question: which way is truly up, and who gets to decide.

"Six people, six stairs, one room, and nobody climbing the wrong way."

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