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Lot Essay
Monumental in size and exacting in execution, Ed Ruscha imbues his 2016 painting Tril Bil Mil with profound insights wrought from decades of practice. Working at his grandest scale yet, Ruscha inscribes a linguistic slope of syllabic statements into a ground built of grainy earthen hues. The titular syllables regress orderly from the top of the canvas in a cascade, diminishing logically from the prodigious size of “TRIL” to the minute, barely discernible “ONE” at the bottom right edge of the canvas.
First exhibited as the centerpiece of his 2016 exhibition “Extremes and In-betweens” at Gagosian Gallery, London, the work gracing the catalogue’s front cover. For this show, Ruscha employed his trademark ‘Boy Scout Utility Modern’ typeface he first designed nearly half a century previously, plotting the font across huge canvases to articulate his internal philosophical ponderings developed in old age. Centering on the relation of the macrocosm to the microcosm, Ruscha describes his series with characteristic humility: “I’m not trying to wrap things up or make final statements or capture anything in a big way. It’s more like, whatever the voyage is, that’s where I am. I’m just traveling along the tops of things, not trying to bring an answer to anything, necessarily, but just to keep making pictures” (E. Ruscha, quoted in F. Nayeri, “Ed Ruscha Continues His Wordplay,” New York Times, November 3, 2016, online).
Tril Bil Mil is a reflection on the artist’s pensive conception of perspective and scale, especially when related to his word paintings. Ruscha often observes how words have no intrinsic size: “I mean, what size is a word, after all?” (E. Ruscha, quoted in J. Weiss, “Words in Space,” in Ed Ruscha / Now Then: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, 2023, p. 160). The artist transforms his chosen words from diction into represented objects, emphasizing their arbitrary size in relation to the picture pane, able to be scaled up or down whilst remaining ‘actual size,’ contrary to how he’s previously depicted objects true-to-size in his compositions, such as the can of Spam soaring comet-like across Actual Size. In the present work, Ruscha further amplifies the distinction words and their referents, meditating on partial numerals coordinated in relative scale so that the conception of ‘trillion’ is magnitudes larger than the solitary digit at the bottom of the numerical waterfall.
Ruscha is able to adduce a certain insouciance through his severing of his words’ concluding syllables above ‘TEN,’ suggesting that even without physical size, the conceptual largess of these terms is too substantial for even his outsized canvas to contain. So they plunge off the picture pane. Picasso similarly dwelt on the inability of an artwork to contain the full sense of a word in his Cubist Still Life with a Bottle of Rum from 1911. In this picture, a refracted tablescape is presented at a variety of comingled perspectives, simultaneously presenting all sides of these fractured geometric forms. In this abstracted field of browns, grays, and blacks, Picasso emphasizes the two-dimensionality of his canvas with his analytical fracturing of objects into forms. However, the words he includes—originating as newspaper titles—are circumscribed into jumbled, discrete letters, the flat canvas no longer able to articulate them as recognizable words.
While Ruscha’s oeuvre has always contented with and recontextualized the archetypical signs and symbols of the American vernacular, here the artist’s keen eye turns to his anxieties regarding the county’s social and environmental future. Tril Bil Mil expressively conveys the perils of overaccumulation, with incomprehensible quantities like billion and trillion suggesting an oblique reference to the accretion of wealth; a constant artistic refrain, similar conceptions of wealth are powerfully evoked in Andy Warhol’s paintings of dollar bills and signs.
Ruscha labored on his primed canvas using stencils to render each word into a negative space against the subtle, powdery ground which hesitates between earthlike and muted black tones. Ruscha describes this color as “a color that forgot it was a color,” a palette reminiscent of the California desert to which he escapes from his Los Angeles home every week (E. Ruscha, quoted in J. Riefe, “Ed Ruscha: the veteran artist on the pleasure of the text,” The Guardian, September 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/30/ed-ruscha-extremes-and-inbetweens-gagosian). The deeply worked, textured surface of the canvas recalls the artist’s important early Gunpowder series from the late 1960s-early 1970s, where the artist first created careful alterations of gradation by rubbing gunpowder into the grains of the paper. These works were the first time in which he constructed letters from negative space, pulled out from the blank canvas against a pigmented backdrop—an effect which Ruscha revitalizes for his Extremes and In-betweens works.
Now in his 80s, Ed Ruscha has joined a select pantheon of artists—including old masters such as Titian and Michelangelo and modern giants like Matisse and Picasso—who have continued to create innovative work into old age. Each artist reached back through their long-lived careers, recalling and reclaiming previous periods and motifs which they then renewed and advanced. Ruscha’s recent work has expanded the boundaries of the ideas which have occupied the artist for decades: “all these little factors… still take place today, and they may not look alike but they have some kind of little silver thread between the two” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Kiko Aebi, “Speculative Geology,” in op. cit. p. 274). Tril Bil Mil is a harmonious accumulation of recollections and citations across the breadth of Ruscha’s distinguished oeuvre, poignantly propelling his practice into an even grander scale.
First exhibited as the centerpiece of his 2016 exhibition “Extremes and In-betweens” at Gagosian Gallery, London, the work gracing the catalogue’s front cover. For this show, Ruscha employed his trademark ‘Boy Scout Utility Modern’ typeface he first designed nearly half a century previously, plotting the font across huge canvases to articulate his internal philosophical ponderings developed in old age. Centering on the relation of the macrocosm to the microcosm, Ruscha describes his series with characteristic humility: “I’m not trying to wrap things up or make final statements or capture anything in a big way. It’s more like, whatever the voyage is, that’s where I am. I’m just traveling along the tops of things, not trying to bring an answer to anything, necessarily, but just to keep making pictures” (E. Ruscha, quoted in F. Nayeri, “Ed Ruscha Continues His Wordplay,” New York Times, November 3, 2016, online).
Tril Bil Mil is a reflection on the artist’s pensive conception of perspective and scale, especially when related to his word paintings. Ruscha often observes how words have no intrinsic size: “I mean, what size is a word, after all?” (E. Ruscha, quoted in J. Weiss, “Words in Space,” in Ed Ruscha / Now Then: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, 2023, p. 160). The artist transforms his chosen words from diction into represented objects, emphasizing their arbitrary size in relation to the picture pane, able to be scaled up or down whilst remaining ‘actual size,’ contrary to how he’s previously depicted objects true-to-size in his compositions, such as the can of Spam soaring comet-like across Actual Size. In the present work, Ruscha further amplifies the distinction words and their referents, meditating on partial numerals coordinated in relative scale so that the conception of ‘trillion’ is magnitudes larger than the solitary digit at the bottom of the numerical waterfall.
Ruscha is able to adduce a certain insouciance through his severing of his words’ concluding syllables above ‘TEN,’ suggesting that even without physical size, the conceptual largess of these terms is too substantial for even his outsized canvas to contain. So they plunge off the picture pane. Picasso similarly dwelt on the inability of an artwork to contain the full sense of a word in his Cubist Still Life with a Bottle of Rum from 1911. In this picture, a refracted tablescape is presented at a variety of comingled perspectives, simultaneously presenting all sides of these fractured geometric forms. In this abstracted field of browns, grays, and blacks, Picasso emphasizes the two-dimensionality of his canvas with his analytical fracturing of objects into forms. However, the words he includes—originating as newspaper titles—are circumscribed into jumbled, discrete letters, the flat canvas no longer able to articulate them as recognizable words.
While Ruscha’s oeuvre has always contented with and recontextualized the archetypical signs and symbols of the American vernacular, here the artist’s keen eye turns to his anxieties regarding the county’s social and environmental future. Tril Bil Mil expressively conveys the perils of overaccumulation, with incomprehensible quantities like billion and trillion suggesting an oblique reference to the accretion of wealth; a constant artistic refrain, similar conceptions of wealth are powerfully evoked in Andy Warhol’s paintings of dollar bills and signs.
Ruscha labored on his primed canvas using stencils to render each word into a negative space against the subtle, powdery ground which hesitates between earthlike and muted black tones. Ruscha describes this color as “a color that forgot it was a color,” a palette reminiscent of the California desert to which he escapes from his Los Angeles home every week (E. Ruscha, quoted in J. Riefe, “Ed Ruscha: the veteran artist on the pleasure of the text,” The Guardian, September 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/30/ed-ruscha-extremes-and-inbetweens-gagosian). The deeply worked, textured surface of the canvas recalls the artist’s important early Gunpowder series from the late 1960s-early 1970s, where the artist first created careful alterations of gradation by rubbing gunpowder into the grains of the paper. These works were the first time in which he constructed letters from negative space, pulled out from the blank canvas against a pigmented backdrop—an effect which Ruscha revitalizes for his Extremes and In-betweens works.
Now in his 80s, Ed Ruscha has joined a select pantheon of artists—including old masters such as Titian and Michelangelo and modern giants like Matisse and Picasso—who have continued to create innovative work into old age. Each artist reached back through their long-lived careers, recalling and reclaiming previous periods and motifs which they then renewed and advanced. Ruscha’s recent work has expanded the boundaries of the ideas which have occupied the artist for decades: “all these little factors… still take place today, and they may not look alike but they have some kind of little silver thread between the two” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Kiko Aebi, “Speculative Geology,” in op. cit. p. 274). Tril Bil Mil is a harmonious accumulation of recollections and citations across the breadth of Ruscha’s distinguished oeuvre, poignantly propelling his practice into an even grander scale.