Ed Ruscha, American Classic

This first exhibition of paintings by the artist in the Parisian spaces of the Gagosian gallery shows a recent series, “Tom Sawyer Paintings”, inspired by the famous novel by Mark Twain. Opportunities have been rare in France over the past fifteen years to see paintings by Ed Ruscha (born in 1937). Those currently presented by the Gagosian gallery (which, in 2015, had exhibited serigraphs) are shown for the first time in Paris. An event therefore, and which also surprises because these paintings do not resemble what one expects to find in the visual language of the American artist, known in particular for his games on text. The hanging considers this astonishment by prefacing this new series with two canvases on raw linen featuring the words of their titles Metro Petro Neuro Psycho (2022) and Tilted Metro Petro (2022), as well as a hologram, on the same principle. Less lit, this first room serves as a preamble to the second, which however only reveals in perspective at first Guardrail (2021), a large horizontal canvas reproducing, like a minimalist sculpture, a highway guardrail, bordered on its left of a trail of sfumato suggesting a presence, or a movement. It is only then that we discover the seven canvases of the “Tom Sawyer Paintings” series, not without a certain theatricality and, it seems, with this Guardrail , a slight ironic distance. New material Ed Ruscha chose to paint wooden slats according to a serial protocol that is customary for him, just like the apparent banality of the subject. A priori the task is tedious; the title of the series also refers to a scene from Mark Twain's novel where the hero, in order not to spend his day repainting a fence, persuades his friends to do this chore for him (this is the only reference textual in this set whose words are absent). No one would suspect that these paintings are signed by Ed Ruscha, a major figure in contemporary American art, if they saw them in another context. However, it is impossible to dissociate their author from these paintings, because it is a piece of American culture that they speak of, and Ed Ruscha himself is part of it. This set, as trivial as its theme, captivates the eye, Variation on the same motif, this painting exercise is above all a matter of lights, of colors, like this midnight blue solid color in the last canvas which catches the eye between two sections of yellow. If we go around the gallery in the – most likely – clockwise direction, the first thus represents horizontal slats, one of which is broken. A black gap appears, as well as the fraying of the wood, like a twist to the geometric arrangement, and almost, the beginning of a narration. In the tables that follow, we can see here a metal nut, there a twisted nail or the ink from a stamp. We linger on the knots and the veins of the boards, details which add to the trompe-l'oeil effect and surprise by their carnal character. We also notice the chromatic shades, beiges and bluish grays, but also the layout of the slats – aligned, vertical, cross – which changes from one composition to another. Price on request (around 800,000 euros). Seen in Le Journal des Arts - Anne Cecile Sanchez