Portrait of Z

Description

A Portrait of Z

oil on gesso board: 36″ x 48″

Original Painting: SOLD

Glycee Archival Limited Edition Prints Available

The Z-Machine, Sandia National Laboratories Department of Energy

Built to simulate nuclear weapon detonations and study nuclear energy, the Z Machine devotes around 15% of its time to star simulation experiments. The machine produces huge amounts of energy – enough to melt diamonds – and has generated temperatures of 3.7 billion Kelvins, the highest ever created by humankind, including the center of hydrogen bomb explosions. It also routinely generates electrical power equivalent to 80 times the Earth’s total power output in a single pulse, at the fraction of a nano-second.

By generating the spectrum of a white dwarf’s surface, researchers fire 26 million amps of electricity through tungsten wires, vaporizing them, and ultimately, “capturing starstuff in a bottle.” The Z Machine has thus delineated a pinnacle moment in the history of astronomy, turning it from a purely observational science into an actively experimental science.

The handling of this painting can be best understood as portraiture and the long art historical tradition that goes along with it. Actively capturing this incredibly complex and beautiful machine in an artistic context serves a type of memory, because in decades down the road, this x-ray generator will certainly be obsolete, fading away into history. Such an object deserves remembering, and if humanity cherishes the images of individuals, which are the direct product of only two other individuals, it only makes sense to celebrate the image of a technological object that was birthed by so many countless minds and intentions.

A Portrait of Z draws a parallel between art and science that is founded on the inherent aesthetic inclination in both. There can be elegance or beauty in the articulation of a theory, just as there is about the stroke or mark of a paintbrush.  Art, like Science and Philosophy, has the capacity to redefine objects, and thus the world we live in through experience and understanding. The beauty of the object dwells not just in its body, not just in the appearance, representation, phenomena of its objecthood, but rather in its very transcendental scientific functionality.