{"product_id":"where-a-face-once-bloomed","title":"Where a Face Once Bloomed","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Where a Face Once Bloomed\" opens on a bronze bust worn to the soft verdigris that only decades of air and rain can leave behind. Where the face should be, there is nothing: a perfectly round, perfectly smooth void, closed and black, swallowing a wide share of the frame. Only a narrow bright rim survives around the skull, a last line of light holding the shape of a head that has otherwise been erased.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe portrait is not applied onto the surface. No paint. No print. No ink. It is scratched into deep green coloured mirror glass, and that green is not incidental: it is the colour the bronze itself has been worn into, the patina of time made permanent in the material rather than merely photographed. The likeness exists only because material has been taken away, controlled surface damage standing in for pigment.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeen from across a room, the bust reads as one monumental gesture, weight, shadow, and a void that pulls the eye toward its centre. Move closer and that certainty dissolves into a field of fine scratches, each one catching the light differently, none of them alone, all of them together the reason a face can be missing and a portrait can still exist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe mirror never lets the viewer stand outside the work. Around the bust, in the untouched glass between the scratches, the room and the person looking are folded into the reflection, so that whoever studies this ruined portrait is, for a moment, folded into it as well, standing where a face once bloomed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLight does not create this image. It sharpens it. The scratches hold their shape in low light and in full light alike, in a quiet room and a bright one; what changes is only the reflection moving across the surface, never the portrait itself, never the void at its centre.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe void is as much the subject as the bust, identity worn away until only its outline remains, set in a green so deep it reads almost as absence, with the viewer's own face drawn into the space where another face used to be. Where a Face Once Bloomed 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A face can be taken away. The shape it leaves behind cannot.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMore about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eQuestions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"TD Fine Art Studio","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":59346053300549,"sku":null,"price":4500.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0904\/0724\/0005\/files\/Where_a_Face_Once_Bloomed_thumbnail.jpg?v=1789397275","url":"https:\/\/tdfineartstudio.com\/products\/where-a-face-once-bloomed","provider":"TD Fine Art Studio","version":"1.0","type":"link"}