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Lot Essay
"I think every artist wants to make a picture that opens the gates to Heaven." Ed Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.,” The New Yorker, June 24, 2013; accessible via: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/01/ed-ruschas-l-a,
An intimate, spellbinding creation, Ed Ruscha’s Pattern of Lust is a particularly mesmerizing example of the artist’s celebrated City Lights series (1985-1990). Highly-coveted and ravishingly beautiful, the City Lights paintings are among Ruscha’s most sought-after series, in which a sparkling nocturnal vision of the Los Angeles grid is paired with the cryptic words and phrases for which Ruscha is best known. “The ‘City Lights’ paintings could be said to articulate a noir-ish version of the sublime… they can be seen as part of Ruscha’s ongoing dialogue with contemporary iterations of transcendence…” (R. Rugoff, “Heavenly Noises,” in Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 21). Indeed, in Pattern of Lust, Ruscha marries a beautiful, transcendent vision of the heavens with the seedier dark side of Hollywood glamor.
Evoking the collective silence of a hushed airplane as it makes its final descent into Los Angeles at night, Pattern of Lust makes for a riveting experience, one that’s made all the more captivating because of the strange words that hover before the eye. As if materializing out of thin air, the phrase “PATTERN OF LUST” rises up from the pictorial ether, rendered by hand in Ruscha’s signature “Boy Scout Utility Modern” font. Ruscha employed an airbrush to create the midnight-blue background and its pattern of twinkling lights, but he painted the text by hand, varying the density of the paint so that the underlying pattern of lights would shine through. The authoritarian nature of Ruscha’s chosen font makes it seem as if an important announcement were being issued, or that the title screen of a major Hollywood film has come up and a hush falls over the crowd. “A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words,” Ruscha has said “They’re just meant to support the drama, like the ‘Hollywood’ sign being held up by sticks” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 29).
The aerial vantage point that Ruscha employed in the City Lights series is one that had informed his work since the early 1960s. Just after his graduation from the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), Ruscha got a job at the Carson/Roberts advertising agency in West Hollywood. There, he routinely took his lunch break up on the roof, and in 1961, he began to photograph the streets below. Ruscha later applied this same visual strategy to a series of aerial views of parking lots, which resulted in a book project called Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles in 1967. Fast forward to the 1980s, when Ruscha was working on a large-scale mural commission for the Dade County Library and spent some time flying back and forth between Miami and L.A. The vision of the city grid, seen at night from the vantage point of the low-flying plane, prompted Ruscha to begin the City Lights series in 1985. According to Richard Marshall, “The two metropolises [Miami and Los Angeles] appear surprisingly similar...from an airport landing approach. In addition, their luminous quality at night is enhanced by the darkness that surrounds them, created in Los Angeles by the desert and mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, and in Miami by the vast Everglades to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east" (R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 209).
Ruscha used an airbrush for the first time in the City Lights series, which is the technique that allowed him to impart a soft, hazy glow to the twinkling lights, creating a kind of hushed ambience. This technique was one that eliminated brushstrokes and thus perfectly suited his needs, and he would continue to use an airbrush for the duration of his career. The city lights can also be interpreted as stars in the sky or a distant galactic nebula. In Pattern of Lust, the sharp, graphic snap of the text against the glimmering lights is what creates the visual spark in the mind’s eye. In snapping back and forth between the analytical task of reading the text and staring in wonderment at the distant lights, the mind is taken to a new place, and this contributes to the “contemporary iteration of transcendence” that the British curator Ralph Rugoff has referred to in describing the series. So, too, did the late, great art critic Peter Schjeldahl described this effect as “a tantalizing standoff, in the brain, between looking and reading” (P. Schjeldahl, “Seeing and Reading: Ed Ruscha” in Lets See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, New York, 2008, p. 233).
Ruscha has long been a keen observer of the world around him, and this he has managed to pair with a sort of romantic love affair with the old-fashioned genre of oil painting, a practice that dates back to the 11th Century. “I could see I was just born for the job, born to watch paint dry,” he once said (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.,” The New Yorker, June 24, 2013; accessible via: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/01/ed-ruschas-l-a). This, coupled with a kind of no-nonsense midwestern practicality, has been part of his life since childhood, even evident in the advance planning he devoted to his newspaper route as a boy. Ruscha might therefore be understood as a “practical Romantic” whose dry sense of humor and love of the grand artistic gesture allowed him to create a new kind of transcendent art form, which in the 1980s had its outlet in the City Lights series, of which Pattern of Lust is an utterly ravishing example.
An intimate, spellbinding creation, Ed Ruscha’s Pattern of Lust is a particularly mesmerizing example of the artist’s celebrated City Lights series (1985-1990). Highly-coveted and ravishingly beautiful, the City Lights paintings are among Ruscha’s most sought-after series, in which a sparkling nocturnal vision of the Los Angeles grid is paired with the cryptic words and phrases for which Ruscha is best known. “The ‘City Lights’ paintings could be said to articulate a noir-ish version of the sublime… they can be seen as part of Ruscha’s ongoing dialogue with contemporary iterations of transcendence…” (R. Rugoff, “Heavenly Noises,” in Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 21). Indeed, in Pattern of Lust, Ruscha marries a beautiful, transcendent vision of the heavens with the seedier dark side of Hollywood glamor.
Evoking the collective silence of a hushed airplane as it makes its final descent into Los Angeles at night, Pattern of Lust makes for a riveting experience, one that’s made all the more captivating because of the strange words that hover before the eye. As if materializing out of thin air, the phrase “PATTERN OF LUST” rises up from the pictorial ether, rendered by hand in Ruscha’s signature “Boy Scout Utility Modern” font. Ruscha employed an airbrush to create the midnight-blue background and its pattern of twinkling lights, but he painted the text by hand, varying the density of the paint so that the underlying pattern of lights would shine through. The authoritarian nature of Ruscha’s chosen font makes it seem as if an important announcement were being issued, or that the title screen of a major Hollywood film has come up and a hush falls over the crowd. “A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words,” Ruscha has said “They’re just meant to support the drama, like the ‘Hollywood’ sign being held up by sticks” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 29).
The aerial vantage point that Ruscha employed in the City Lights series is one that had informed his work since the early 1960s. Just after his graduation from the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), Ruscha got a job at the Carson/Roberts advertising agency in West Hollywood. There, he routinely took his lunch break up on the roof, and in 1961, he began to photograph the streets below. Ruscha later applied this same visual strategy to a series of aerial views of parking lots, which resulted in a book project called Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles in 1967. Fast forward to the 1980s, when Ruscha was working on a large-scale mural commission for the Dade County Library and spent some time flying back and forth between Miami and L.A. The vision of the city grid, seen at night from the vantage point of the low-flying plane, prompted Ruscha to begin the City Lights series in 1985. According to Richard Marshall, “The two metropolises [Miami and Los Angeles] appear surprisingly similar...from an airport landing approach. In addition, their luminous quality at night is enhanced by the darkness that surrounds them, created in Los Angeles by the desert and mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, and in Miami by the vast Everglades to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east" (R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 209).
Ruscha used an airbrush for the first time in the City Lights series, which is the technique that allowed him to impart a soft, hazy glow to the twinkling lights, creating a kind of hushed ambience. This technique was one that eliminated brushstrokes and thus perfectly suited his needs, and he would continue to use an airbrush for the duration of his career. The city lights can also be interpreted as stars in the sky or a distant galactic nebula. In Pattern of Lust, the sharp, graphic snap of the text against the glimmering lights is what creates the visual spark in the mind’s eye. In snapping back and forth between the analytical task of reading the text and staring in wonderment at the distant lights, the mind is taken to a new place, and this contributes to the “contemporary iteration of transcendence” that the British curator Ralph Rugoff has referred to in describing the series. So, too, did the late, great art critic Peter Schjeldahl described this effect as “a tantalizing standoff, in the brain, between looking and reading” (P. Schjeldahl, “Seeing and Reading: Ed Ruscha” in Lets See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, New York, 2008, p. 233).
Ruscha has long been a keen observer of the world around him, and this he has managed to pair with a sort of romantic love affair with the old-fashioned genre of oil painting, a practice that dates back to the 11th Century. “I could see I was just born for the job, born to watch paint dry,” he once said (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.,” The New Yorker, June 24, 2013; accessible via: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/01/ed-ruschas-l-a). This, coupled with a kind of no-nonsense midwestern practicality, has been part of his life since childhood, even evident in the advance planning he devoted to his newspaper route as a boy. Ruscha might therefore be understood as a “practical Romantic” whose dry sense of humor and love of the grand artistic gesture allowed him to create a new kind of transcendent art form, which in the 1980s had its outlet in the City Lights series, of which Pattern of Lust is an utterly ravishing example.