Edward Ruscha

Billy Al Bengston, California (acquired directly from the artist)
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Private collection, New York

Edward Ruscha’s world is one where the word and its image become one and the same. Meaning moves fluidly between the multitude of roles assumed by the word: as object, landscape, portrait, linguistic item and idea. The disciplines of semiotics and semantics all come into question, not through the literary, but through the visual. Truth is a particularly fine example of Ruscha’s provocative word paintings; the ‘text’ and its ‘meanings’ are all loaded here. The artist asks us ‘what is truthful?’, and here that verisimilitude (or not, as the case may be) is connected to the painted surface, so that compositional, perspectival and chromatic questions are brought to the fore. These issues, of course, are all crucial to the very dynamic of painting itself, so that art itself becomes the epistemological tool.