Standing in Lunar Silence

Three figures stand in a row, their shoulders close to the edge of shadow, each coat identical in cut, each head replaced by the moon. One carries it whole and round. One has already given half its face to the dark. One is almost gone, a thin blade of light where a head should be.

Standing in Lunar Silence holds a quiet procession of presence and departure. Read from one figure to the next, they step through a single cycle, from fullness into shadow and from shadow into near absence, as if one body were watching itself fade across a month compressed into a single held moment.

Nothing here is added. No paint. No print. No ink. The image is built the only way Art with Scratch knows how, through controlled scratches worked into the acrylic glass until the surface itself becomes the source of light. The moons, the coats, the long shadows at the figures' feet, all of it is held in a field of fine scratches rather than drawn onto the surface.

The work is always present, with or without direct light. What changes is depth. Under a raking light the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, the coats pull further into black and the moons seem to lift off the glass. Light does not create the image, it sharpens it, so the work reads differently depending on where you stand without ever losing what it shows.

From across a room the three figures resolve into one monumental image, upright, still, almost ceremonial. Close up, that certainty dissolves into a field of individual marks, each one small, none of them decisive alone, together forming faces that are not faces at all.

Standing in Lunar Silence continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print. Here that damage becomes a way of asking what remains of a self when its face is replaced by something as old and impersonal as the moon, present and fading at once, recognisable and anonymous in the same breath.

"Some things are only ever half seen, and still we know exactly what they are."

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

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