This painting, executed on a small canvas in a sufficiently loose painting style to warrant calling it an "oil sketch", depicts a stylized coal liquefaction plant, conveniently located on a seashore, in an unclear metabolic relationship with the nearby abundance of water into which it can tap by means of thick pipes emanating from its concrete base.
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| HYDRA Coal Liquefaction Plant, oil on "Stylex" canvas, 30 x 40 cm |
Certain nations, nation states, countries, etc. in the history of modern civilization found it necessary to expand, colonize, or engage in questionable trade relations with other states because their own natural resources did not suit the demands of said state's motorized civil society nor war machinery. The alternative to expansion however could have been the development of efficient means of transformation of naturally occurring unsuitable resources (coal, in this case) by utilizing either alchemistic, holistic, biochemical or chemical pathways on an industrial level. Synthetic fuel or synfuel is a liquid or sometimes gaseous fuel, obtained from either syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, or a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Synthetic fuel also has the benefits of pureness and overall superiority to ordinary fossil fuel; it is for instance extremely clear in comparison to the yellowish tones of conventional fuel, this is due to the near-total absence of sulfur and aromatics.
This synfuel aggregate is located (in the author's imagination) somewhere at the Crimean seashore. Derivation of raw material and secret methods of liquefaction with seawater remain opaque, or purely imaginary. Warning signs are as absent as left behind signs of protesters who would certainly be quick to point out some sinister connection to the global warming complex. Protesters or innocent passers byers would have been absent or completely hypothetical in the year 1943, the theoretical or imaginary year of the erection of this edifice.
This plant, as it is located near the seashore, also serves as an allegory of the well known legend of St. Augustine and the child with a spoon or seashell. Augustine was a Father of the Church and Bishop of Hippo in north Africa (an alternatively imagined location for the plant depicted above). One day, as he walked by the shore, he saw a small child trying to empty all the water out of the sea using a seashell. Augustine makes a remark about the inadvisability of such an endeavor and the unlikelihood of success, and the child explains that St. Augustines efforts of understanding the mystery of the trinity were just as unlikely to succeed as said child's efforts in transferring the waters of the sea with a seashell into a hole in the sand. St. Augustine turns around in exasperation, then looks back, and the child, the seashell and the hole are gone.
(sea also: this painting)
🌊Placeholder for yet to be added poem🌊
(Oil sketch © 1952 by Torsten Slama and the Coal Liquefaction Group)
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