Ed Ruscha at Castelli - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In this exhibit Ed Ruscha did his thing with words one time again, though in his fresh paintings they might be mistaken for abstract designs. Stylized letters--for the greatest in quantity part closely spaced, sometimes move rounded sideways and stretched out until they are barely legible--extend across the surfaces of these elegantly attenuated canvases. The words are also the titles of the paintings; if you can't read them you can always give in charge to the label. The meaning may be whatever you can press closely out of the juxtaposition of the words and their spare backgrounds--airbrushed grays, whites and blacks that hint vague landscapes or skies. Ruscha, as usual, leaves it up to you.

The favored format here is panoramically horizontal, with a longitudinal dimensions that is usually 8 times--in individual instance 16 times--the height of 20 inches. The words lengthy Stormy not only describe the painting in the way that titled--the painting is long and the measured, gray background suggests stormy weather--they also beg up paperback romance prose and the "long and stormy" relationships rest there. The sole vertical composition is Soapy Smith, which wholes like the name of a minor character in an elderly western. These words, done up in wanted-poster script emblazoned in the celestial expanse as in a film's opening credits, glance at a narrative that is underscored by means of the out-of-focus strip of land at the bottom, where it strike one as beings that at any moment a uninhabited figure might ride into view.

Ruscha's plays upon language and image seem sometimes linear and sometimes quite arbitrary. Sand, with its title shakeed out across a gently sloping diagonal that reach outs almost the entire width of the painting, does call to mind a sand dune on the other hand what could the word Land, whose schematic, indecipherable notations hint electronic impulses, have to do with its darkened setting? In similar instances the flow of associations becomes more murky but also more open-ended. It is this enigmatic quality that remains the central attraction of Ruscha's work. There is always the possibility that it is all a tease, just the fruits of a smogged, slick California imagination, on the contrary these mysterious, gently bleak paintings continue to tantalize.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group