The Lovers

The Lovers is a contemporary artwork about intimacy, longing, and the veils that remain between two people even in their closest moment.

Two figures lean into a kiss. Their heads are wrapped in cloth, every fold pressed into place, the fabric holding the exact shape of a tenderness it will not allow to be completed. They are as close as two people can be, and still they do not touch. The kiss lands on linen. The faces beneath remain unknown, even to each other.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image appears through controlled surface damage on acrylic glass. Each fold of fabric, each shadow between the two figures is built from controlled scratches that catch the light differently as the viewer moves. From a distance, the embrace reads as monumental and absolute, two forms carved out of darkness. Step closer, and the surface dissolves into a field of fine marks, the lovers retreating into the material they were drawn from.

The image bows to one of the most haunting gestures in the history of surrealism, Rene Magritte's veiled lovers, and rebuilds it in an entirely different language. Where Magritte used paint to conceal, this work uses removal to reveal, and what it reveals is the same unresolvable question: can we ever truly know the person we hold?

The veil is the work. It is the distance inside every intimacy, the part of the other that stays hidden no matter how close we come. The scratches repeat that thought in material form, an image that is present and withheld at once, surfacing and disappearing as the light travels across the glass.

The Lovers 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.

"They are as close as two people can be. The veil is what remains."

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.