Still Under Everything

Still Under Everything is a contemporary artwork about weight, silence and the quiet absurdity of what we carry without ever being asked.

A figure with a moon where the face should be sits motionless on a brutalist concrete block. On its shoulders, a small white car, balanced there with the ease of something that has always been. There is no protest in the posture. No strain. Only a stillness so complete it begins to feel like acceptance.

The influence of René Magritte is deliberate but restrained. Magritte understood that surrealism was not about escape from reality, it was about seeing reality too clearly. This image follows that logic. The moon replaces the face not to hide identity, but to suggest something untethered, something lunar and cold and far away from the world of cars and concrete that surrounds it.

The figure appears through controlled surface damage on acrylic glass. No paint. No print. No ink. Light moves across the surface and deepens the image, so that the figure breathes between clarity and quiet shadow. From across the room, the composition reads as a single monumental image. Closer, it dissolves into a field of precise marks, each one a moment of removal rather than addition.

Brutalist concrete carries no warmth. It was built to endure, not to comfort. Seated on it, the figure is not trapped but placed. It belongs to a world that holds weight without asking why, and it holds all of it, still, without complaint, without expression.

Still Under Everything 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.

"We carry the strangest things. And we sit so still while doing it."

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.