Two Profiles Kissed by Fire

Two profiles lean toward each other until the space between them all but disappears, the moment before a kiss held in a single suspended breath. Nothing here is added. The image exists only because the surface around it was taken away, a field of individual marks scratched into deep red coloured mirror glass until two faces rose out of the dark.

Up close the work dissolves into texture, coarse fields of fine scratches gathered like static across hair and shoulder, giving way to the sparse, deliberate contour lines that carry the nose, the lips, the closed eye. Step back and those same marks resolve into the couple, monumental and still, holding a single gesture that needs no story beyond itself.

Red carries the weight of the piece as much as the drawing does, the colour of blood warmth and want, of a moment too charged to stay quiet. It sits behind the figures like heat behind glass, so the kiss reads as much as felt as seen.

The mirror never lets you stand outside the work. Around the two profiles, the room you stand in, its light, its walls, your own outline, gathers in the untouched glass, so the space of looking becomes part of the composition itself. You do not just view this piece. You are folded into it.

The image is always there, present in the surface whether or not a light is aimed at it. What changes is only the depth of the room reflected around it and the sharpness of the contrast when light does fall across the scratches. Light does not create this kiss. It sharpens it.

Two Profiles Kissed by Fire continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part.

"Some kisses are not remembered in words, only in the light they leave behind."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

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