The Face Between Directions

The Face Between Directions begins as a mystery of angles. Two profiles turn away from each other, each looking outward into its own silence, and yet between them a third face gathers, looking straight ahead, meeting the viewer without hesitation. Nothing here was drawn or printed. The face exists because the surface has been taken away, not added to.

The anatomy bends in ways the eye should reject, yet somehow accepts. A brow becomes a cheekbone, a jaw dissolves into a second temple, and the features connect along lines that feel more like memory than structure. It is a face built from contradiction, an image that only holds together because light allows it to.

That light is the true subject of the piece. Against pure blackness, only the brightest contours survive, so the work lives in extremes, in what is kept and what is erased. Move past it and the face can vanish into shadow, then return as the angle shifts, as if identity itself were something that has to be found again and again rather than simply seen.

From across a room, the piece reads as one monumental presence, a single face holding three directions at once. Step closer and that presence breaks into a quiet field of controlled scratches on acrylic glass, each mark holding no meaning alone, together forming a gaze that cannot be pinned to one direction.

There is something deeply human in that duality. We rarely look only one way. We face outward toward others while something in us keeps watching straight ahead, unresolved, undecided, waiting to be understood. This work gives that inner tension a form, built from what has been removed rather than what has been placed.

The Face Between Directions 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.

"Between two directions, a third face waits to be seen."

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.