Trump Fiddles While Rome Burns

The old story says Nero played while Rome burned. Here the story is given a new actor: Donald Trump, laurel wreath set on his head, toga draped as if it had always belonged to him, bow lifted to a fiddle while a skyline ignites behind his shoulder. The gesture is almost serene, a man entirely absorbed in his own performance.

In the finished work that absorption is what remains. The face survives as a field of fine scratches, caught mid note, eyes lowered toward the instrument rather than toward the fire. The laurel catches the light along its leaves, the raised arm and the bow hold a clean, confident line, and the hand on the fiddle's neck is drawn with the same care as the face. The body beneath sinks back into the acrylic glass, a toga implied rather than described, a silhouette that gives weight without asking to be read in detail.

Lower in the frame, two small cities burn. They are not described in full, only enough to read as fire: jagged towers of light against a dark base, flame shapes built from a field of individual marks rather than any single scratch. The rest of the skyline, the rest of the night, is left black and untouched, so the eye has nowhere to go but the burning and the man who will not look at it.

That refusal is the whole joke and the whole warning. Nero's fiddle is the oldest shorthand for a leader entertained by his own catastrophe, and the work asks, plainly, whether the costume has really changed in two thousand years. The music plays on. The city keeps burning. Only one of the two gets to be lit.

Trump Fiddles While Rome Burns belongs to Heads of State, 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 turning one moment from the news into a single image that gets its laugh first and its reckoning after.

No paint. No print. No ink. The figure is formed by controlled scratches worked into the surface of acrylic glass, present at every hour, not waiting for a lamp to summon it. Light does not create the image. It sharpens it, deepening the contrast between the man who is seen and the city that is not.

"He kept the beat. The city kept the time."

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