The Equation of Eternal Wine

The Equation of Eternal Wine imagines a fragment of Omar Khayyam’s mentality entering the physical world. A quatrain by the Persian philosopher, mathematician, and thinker becomes the conceptual centre of the work, surrounded by the permanence of mathematical formulas and transformed into a dense material field of oil, ink, wood, and pigment.
Khayyam’s poem speaks of wine, joy, and the fleeting present—the recognition that life exists only in the moment in which it is experienced. Against this, the mathematical formulas suggest the human desire for permanence, order, measurement, and certainty. The painting exists between these two forces: reason and pleasure, permanence and transience, thought and matter.
The central surface is deliberately physical and turbulent. Hot and dark colours accumulate through layers of paint, while the Persian and English versions of the poem interrupt the surface like fragments of thought. The English text draws on Edward FitzGerald’s nineteenth-century translation of Khayyam, placing the Persian original in dialogue with its later Western interpretation.
While making the work, I was not simply illustrating the poem; I was responding to it bodily. I was dancing with the poem. The movement, density, and turbulence of the painting became a physical response to its invitation to embrace the present.
The work asks whether something inherently temporary—joy, youth, wine, a moment of being alive—can ever become permanent. Mathematics attempts to preserve knowledge through structure; poetry preserves experience through language; painting attempts to give both a body.