Trump Toasts the Burning Globe

Trump Toasts the Burning Globe opens on a ritual everyone recognises: two glasses raised, a silent nod, the small ceremony that seals a deal before a word is said. Here the glasses are filled not with champagne but with crude oil, its surface so smooth it could pass for glamour, and on each stirring stick, where a cocktail would carry an olive or a twist of lemon, a tiny globe burns instead.

In the finished work almost nothing is given for free. The two profiles, instantly recognisable, survive as fields of fine scratches catching the light along the brow, the set of the jaw, the fall of the hair, while the suits around them fall back into the black and are mostly let go. What stays sharp is what the piece chooses to keep sharp: the faces, the raised glasses, the small spinning globes, the parts that carry the joke and the warning in equal measure.

Between the two men the glasses hold the brightest passage in the whole piece, a crossing of scratched light where the oil seems to glow from inside the acrylic glass itself. It is a toast staged like a sacrament, lit from above as if it deserved reverence, and that is exactly the discomfort the image is built on.

The globe on a stick is the oldest trick of satire: shrink the thing that should be unbearably large until it fits in a glass, until it can be lifted, sipped past, swallowed without much thought. Two men who steer a great deal of what happens to that globe are shown treating it like garnish, a flourish to a drink rather than the one thing both of them are meant to protect.

Trump Toasts the Burning Globe 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 a single moment of power into an image that needs no caption to be understood.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, a field of individual marks that the eye reassembles into two faces and a drink no one should be proud of. The image is always present, with or without direct light. Light does not create it, it sharpens it: under a focused source the oil in the glasses deepens and the globes seem to catch fire again, and the piece reads differently depending on where you stand without ever losing its shape.

Seen from across the room it reads as a single dark gesture, two heads and a shared drink. Up close it turns into something closer to a verdict, a field of scratches that asks what exactly is being celebrated, and by whom, while the globe keeps burning between them.

"Cheers," it seems to say, "to whatever is left."

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