Edward Ruscha

“Hollywood is like a verb to me. It’s something you can do to any subject or any thing – ‘Hollywoodize’ it.” (the artist quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cotton Puffs, Q Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, 2004, p. 15)

Projected onto an early morning sky-line, the word “IF” rises up full of promise from the nocturnal slope beneath. Dominating the canvas in a way that is strongly reminiscent of the iconic Hollywood sign, IF, unusually for Ruscha, dynamically fuses text and image. This makes the painting even more filmic. The image becomes akin to a slightly out of focus movie strip, projected onto a screen whilst the spelling of IF below acts like subtitles. “Like everyone else, I’m a frustrated film director.” (Ed Ruscha quoted in N. Benezra and K. Brougher, Ed Ruscha, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 171)

Creating a powerful subtlety of tone while the letters are brought into stark contrast, Ruscha brings to bear on this image all his training as a sign-writer and his passion for film. The planar nature of the painting reveals Ruscha’s sophisticated use of photographic imagery, allowing him to distance himself from the subjective and granting him the means to see how an object could be rendered flat. “Other artists translate the three dimensions of the real world into a two dimensional image. The photograph did that for me.” (the artist quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cotton Puffs, Q Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, 2004, p. 13)

Ruscha’s brilliance in appropriating poignant phrases and single words is amply demonstrated here. The viewer becomes reflective in front of this painting, aided by the soothing soft-focus tones and by the thoughts the word triggers: “if only” “what if”…  The echoing of the word, Ruscha’s typical white font lying under the larger letters, reinforces the contemplative feeling and the open-ended sense of the word. This is reflected in the image which hovers in a twilight zone between day and night.  By isolating much heard words and sights, Ruscha gives them new life, enabling each of us to respond individually to his work and the words that are their subjects, and to revel in and reflect on their myriad meanings. That this is such a short word, that there are so few letters helps to make this such a strong image, the scarcity of the letters enhancing their suggestive quality. Like Jasper Johns in his number and letter paintings, Ruscha enhances the flatness and abstract nature of the letters so that we end up looking at these familiar forms, stripped of context, not as part of something else but as they are themselves, as their shapes describe them, as art.