The Prancing Horse in Silence

The Prancing Horse in Silence holds a steering wheel at the centre of the frame, seen straight on, the way a driver would see it a moment before the engine turns over. The dials sit soft and pale behind the rim, the three spokes converge toward the middle, and there, raised on its small round medallion, the famous horse rears on its hind legs, dark against a disc of light.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, a field of individual marks that sit as light on deep black. The leather of the rim, the grain of the dashboard, the true size of the wheel, none of that survives the crossing; what remains is a circle, a cross of spokes, and a scatter of small glowing instruments that still seem to be reading something, somewhere, in the dark.

The image is always present, it does not wait for a lamp to find it. Light does not create the image, it sharpens it, so under a raking light the scratches catch and reflect, the rim tightens into a hard ring and the dial faces lift free of the void behind them. It reads differently from different angles, without ever losing the horse at its centre.

Most marks in this series are carried to be seen by other people, a monogram on a trunk, a crown on a dial, worn so a room will notice. The wheel is the opposite kind of status symbol. It faces one person only, present at the exact point where a hand rests and a car is told what to do. Enlarged on a gallery wall, that private badge becomes the one legible thing left in an otherwise unlit cabin.

The horse itself began as another man's mark before it was Ferrari's: it flew on the fuselage of a First World War fighter pilot, Francesco Baracca, and was given to Enzo Ferrari afterwards, by Baracca's mother, as a sign she hoped would carry the same fortune onto the road.

The Prancing Horse in Silence belongs to Objects of Desire, 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 asking who we trust once no one else is left to see the sign we chose.

This work is an independent artwork by Tijs Dragtsma, not made, licensed or endorsed by Ferrari. It takes the horse seriously as a shape and a story, not as a commission from the house that owns it. Which emblem would you still want under your own hand, if no one ever climbed in beside you to see it.

"A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure."

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