Alexander Kobulnicky

Thorazine (chlorpromazine)
18” x 18”
2009
Acrylic on canvas
$500

Thorazine was the first antipsychotic drug ever developed, and its discovery in 1950 upended psychiatric medicine. Until then, the only treatments for psychosis had been largely ineffective shots in the dark, ECT or frontal lobotomy. Most patients were simply untreated in any practical way.

Thorazine itself is seldom used now because it acts indiscriminately on many receptors in the brain, and consequently its side effects can be quite severe, including extreme sedation, seizures and liver damage, but it remains the iconic antipsychotic drug.

Maybe because their function is to inhibit thought (albeit psychotic thought), antipsychotics are usually experienced as blank, crushing and stultifying. Even Wikipedia, in an unusually poetic turn, warns that they stifle “pensive thought and awe.”

These molecules are rendered as space-filling models, in a natural, low-energy conformation, and displayed from an angle that shows off as much of their structure as possible. The atoms are color-coded, with carbon being black, hydrogen white, chlorine green, sulfur yellow, and nitrogen blue. They are painted in artist-quality acrylics, on gessoed canvas