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拍品專文
Emerging from his iconic word paintings, Ed Ruscha’s Johnny Tomorrow sees the eponymous text suspended cinematically at the center of a twilight sky. Marking Ruscha’s triumphant return to painting with conventional materials, the canvas evinces the lessons learnt from his novel explorations in unconventional media—which spanned gunpowder to jelly and chocolate—during the artist’s sojourn away from his paintbrush. Ruscha approaches the canvas with a newfound lyricality, attending even more closely to the subtle effects of his materials after years of experimentation. The effects are visually and mentally engaging, the artist himself noting that the present work “scratches at the back of the brain” (quoted in R. Dean and E. Wright, eds., Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Three: 1983-1987, New York, 2007, p. 104).
In the present work, Ruscha deploys an innovative technique to compose his image, which he terms “reverse stenciling.” First engaging stenciled letters to demarcate his carefully constructed typefaces across the canvas, Ruscha then painted the composition. After completing the painting, he removed the stencils, revealing his letters as spaces of white gessoed ground in an irreversible, subtractive process. His technique was at once thoroughly contemporary while simultaneously recalling the red-figure Attic vase painters of antiquity. The effect compellingly completes his composition in a single revelatory act, establishing Ruscha’s text as a preconceived figure against the painted ground. Ruscha elucidates how he views his meticulous process-based practice separately from the painterly approach of the Abstract Expressionists, describing how “they wanted to collapse the whole art process into one act; I wanted to break it into stages” (quoted in The Works of Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 27).
Johnny Tomorrow evokes in its swarthy upper register the last vestiges of sunlight shining through scattered clouds, the fading light signaling the end of the day poignantly juxtaposing with “tomorrow” to imbue the work with a sense of cyclicality, one day ending anticipating the coming tomorrow. The mellow cream yellow in the foreground recalls the day’s first illumination as the sun peaks above the horizon, the clarity of tone and form resembling daybreak. Ruscha plays into this association through his strategic placement of “tomorrow” within this dawn-colored passage, establishing a dichotomy between the upper twilight signaling the ending of one day and the lower dawn heralding a new beginning. The artist challenges expectations, evincing what Dave Hickey describes as the way his paintings “derive their complexity from their complicity with the world around them… they are complexity itself” (“The Song of the Giant Egress” in R. Dean and E. Wright, op. cit., 2007, p. 10). The work’s title references the many Hollywood movies and characters named Johnny, as well as the American slang phrase “Johnny on the spot.” Simultaneously serious and cheeky, Johnny Tomorrow elegantly condenses low and high brow culture into a singular tableau, reveling in Ruscha’s mastery of the possibilities of text and the ambiguities of linguistic meaning.
In the present work, Ruscha deploys an innovative technique to compose his image, which he terms “reverse stenciling.” First engaging stenciled letters to demarcate his carefully constructed typefaces across the canvas, Ruscha then painted the composition. After completing the painting, he removed the stencils, revealing his letters as spaces of white gessoed ground in an irreversible, subtractive process. His technique was at once thoroughly contemporary while simultaneously recalling the red-figure Attic vase painters of antiquity. The effect compellingly completes his composition in a single revelatory act, establishing Ruscha’s text as a preconceived figure against the painted ground. Ruscha elucidates how he views his meticulous process-based practice separately from the painterly approach of the Abstract Expressionists, describing how “they wanted to collapse the whole art process into one act; I wanted to break it into stages” (quoted in The Works of Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 27).
Johnny Tomorrow evokes in its swarthy upper register the last vestiges of sunlight shining through scattered clouds, the fading light signaling the end of the day poignantly juxtaposing with “tomorrow” to imbue the work with a sense of cyclicality, one day ending anticipating the coming tomorrow. The mellow cream yellow in the foreground recalls the day’s first illumination as the sun peaks above the horizon, the clarity of tone and form resembling daybreak. Ruscha plays into this association through his strategic placement of “tomorrow” within this dawn-colored passage, establishing a dichotomy between the upper twilight signaling the ending of one day and the lower dawn heralding a new beginning. The artist challenges expectations, evincing what Dave Hickey describes as the way his paintings “derive their complexity from their complicity with the world around them… they are complexity itself” (“The Song of the Giant Egress” in R. Dean and E. Wright, op. cit., 2007, p. 10). The work’s title references the many Hollywood movies and characters named Johnny, as well as the American slang phrase “Johnny on the spot.” Simultaneously serious and cheeky, Johnny Tomorrow elegantly condenses low and high brow culture into a singular tableau, reveling in Ruscha’s mastery of the possibilities of text and the ambiguities of linguistic meaning.