Nuclear Seed by JoCa, oil on canvas, 150 by 150 cm — red and blue horizontal streaks across the eyes of a figure in a white high collar against a near-black ground

Nuclear Seed: a metre and a half of interference

Most of the paintings on this site are somewhere between fifty centimetres and a metre. Nuclear Seed is 150 × 150 cm — nearly five feet square. That matters before anything else does, because at that size the figure is life-size and the interference across the face is roughly the width of your shoulders.

You do not look at this painting. You stand in front of it.

What is actually on the canvas

A head and shoulders, squared to the viewer, against a ground so dark it reads as no space at all. The figure wears something white and high-necked — stiff, formal, almost clerical — painted with real care. Every fold of it resolves.

Across the top third, where the eyes and brow belong, the painting breaks into horizontal bands: cold blue, blood red, bone white, hard black. They run edge to edge with clean upper and lower boundaries, like a signal dropping out mid-transmission. Below them the nose and mouth survive, modelled and calm. At the lower left a patch of rust and orange bleeds into the black.

Detail of Nuclear Seed by JoCa showing the red and blue horizontal bands running across the face
Detail — the bands have hard edges, top and bottom.

The tension is between two kinds of painting

What makes it work is that the two halves are painted with opposite intentions and equal skill.

The collar is patient, traditional, almost devotional work — the kind of passage that belongs in a portrait from four hundred years ago. The bands are fast, flat and graphic. Neither is a mistake, and neither wins. The painting refuses to settle into being either a portrait or an abstraction, and it holds that refusal at a scale you cannot look away from.

It is also, technically, the joke at the centre of the work: a corrupted-screen effect is exactly the thing a camera produces by accident. Here it has been built by hand, slowly, in oil, at a metre and a half. The failure is deliberate and it took a long time.

Hanging

Nuclear Seed by JoCa installed in a gallery with track lighting, flanked by two smaller works
Installed, flanked by two smaller works — the scale reads properly here.

Photographs of paintings flatten scale; everything arrives looking the same size on a screen. The installation shot is the honest one. Against a wall with other work beside it, Nuclear Seed is plainly the thing the room is arranged around.

The Seed works

There are three: Nuclear Seed, Processed Seed and Settled Seed. The titles describe a sequence — something volatile, something put through a process, something that comes to rest — and the paintings follow it.

Nuclear is the loud one. It is the version where the interference is still violent and the ground has not decided what it is. The other two are quieter, and quieter is not the same as calmer.

The same instinct runs through The Dreamer, where the obliteration softens into weather before hardening back into a glitch, and through the fractured faces of Echoes of Haworth.

Nuclear Seed is oil on canvas, 150 × 150 cm, unique — no edition, no reproduction. For enquiries use the contact page.

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