Nightmares and Migraines is a vibrant gem-like example of Ed Ruscha’s celebrated series of text paintings. This work not only reveals the artist’s fascination with language and text, but also denotes his preoccupation with the tropes and aesthetic of American cinema. The luminescent rings that characterize this work are immediately of the space age sci-fi aesthetic that characterized so much of 1980s cinema: we are led to think of Star Wars, The Terminator, and particularly E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. By creating this cosmological composition, Ruscha infuses his works with the atmosphere of those seminal movies without specifically referencing any of them.
Ed Ruscha is a quintessentially Californian artist whose œuvre is suffused with the influence of American cinema. The artistic precedent of the silver screen informs so much of his best known work, from the brilliant sunset-like backdrops of some of his later text paintings, to the extraordinary panoramic angle that he used to depict the gas stations of the west coast in the early 1960s. In the present work, this influence is palpable. However, according to the artist, it is all but unintentional. Ruscha operates as the product of his environment: “If I’m influenced by the movies, it’s from way down underneath, not just on the surface. A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words. In a way they’re words in front of the old Paramount mountain... I have a background, foreground. It’s so simple. And the backgrounds are of no particular character. They’re just meant to support the drama.” (Ed Ruscha quoted in: Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, 2004, p. 21)
“Ruscha has often recounted his early fascination with commercial art and a parallel frustration with painting. Initially Ruscha’s work as a commercial artist simply outweighed any compulsion to paint. In time he recoiled his doubt, conjoining his interest in vernacular imagery, typography, book design, filmmaking, and photo-documentary work with an emerging desire to paint. Paradoxically it was his work in a wide variety of non-traditional media, and a distrust of the career path of a painter, that enabled Ruscha to overcome his uncertainty and freed him to create paintings of striking originality”
(N. Benezra, “Ed Ruscha, Painting and Artistic License,” Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 145).
“Ruscha has often recounted his early fascination with commercial art and a parallel frustration with painting. Initially Ruscha’s work as a commercial artist simply outweighed any compulsion to paint. In time he recoiled his doubt, conjoining his interest in vernacular imagery, typography, book design, filmmaking, and photo-documentary work with an emerging desire to paint. Paradoxically it was his work in a wide variety of non-traditional media, and a distrust of the career path of a painter, that enabled Ruscha to overcome his uncertainty and freed him to create paintings of striking originality”
Ed Ruscha’s dramatic and seductive compositions are the result of his first road trip to California while on the way to art school from Oklahoma. The colossal billboards of de-contextualized words and a constant barrage of images, projecting onto the endless expanse of the mythical West, acted as a major influence on his visual vernacular and resulted in a career-long obsession with text and image. The boundless miles of the great American landscape not only became his main subject, but it triggered inspiration for his entire oeuvre. Aggrandized and isolated in Ruscha’s paintings, words and phrases are stripped of context, imploring the viewer to contemplate the transcendent power of language. His work is as cerebral as it is aesthetically invigorating, its imagery activating a tremor of associations. While summoning relatable concepts and imagery, Ruscha infuses the painting with a mesmerizing ephemerality, while, at the same time, reminding us collectively of our own mortality and questioning the infinite bounds of our own ability to perceive. Exploring the interplay between symbol, text and iconography, the present work exemplifies the artist’s most seminal paintings in which seductive compositions are the result of an uncanny mingling of semantics and visual motifs.
Executed with the incredible energy and graphic force that typify this electric œuvre, Nightmares and Migraines should be considered a distillation of the genius of Ruscha’s unique aesthetic idiom, melding his own creative vision with the aesthetics of the silver screen, to create a unique work of unbridled impact.