Ed Ruscha's Fifty Years of Painting is cool to the core

His work plays its part, too: no paintings are cooler that Ed’s — those pared-down, enigmatic and iconic gas stations on fire, sardonic combos of word-and-image (like an idyllic sunset on a lake emblazoned with the words: "Not a Bad World, is it?") and reverential homages to the dim interiors of cinemas.

Born in 1937, making his first proper paintings in the Fifties, Ruscha belongs to a generation of artists — pop, conceptual and otherwise — who wanted to make art that was about, and crafted from, the materials and forms of urban America.

While Warhol went for celebrity shots, Rauschenberg for newspaper photos and household junk, Johns for flags and Rosenquist for billboards, Ruscha drew on graphic design and typefaces from the world of advertising.
Cinema was a major influence, too — Ruscha often painted in a widescreen format and his trademark combination of texts superimposed on sunsets, landscapes and abstract colour backgrounds are redolent of the title sequences and captions in movies. One of his breakthrough works was a painting of the Twentieth Century Fox logo.
Perhaps I have just seen too many of Ruscha’s paintings but this exhibition tells his story well, rather than with fresh zest. Sure, there are plenty of his symbols of contemporary America.

Some, such as the LA County Museum of Art on Fire (1965-8), play on the fragility of the man-made order of modernism. Others work synaesthetically, that is relating word and image, like Purity (1972), whose title word emerges from a white mist.

Ruscha remains inventive — in the Eighties, he painted cinematic clichés: a trail of wagons across the plains or a wolf howling — all perceived through a black-and-grey gloom as if these were images lodged deep in the collective unconscious.

In the early Nineties, he turned cinema into a metaphor for death. In The End (1991), the final frame of an old movie, with all its crackles and scratches, becomes a beautiful abstract painting.

The work has a brilliant simplicity and yet this quality of Ruscha’s paintings is also the show’s weakness. I think I’d rather have one on my bedroom wall than see them in a gallery. The surfaces are so smooth that any attempt to find depth in them seems to bounce off. One appreciates and consumes them a little too quickly for comfort. Maybe I’m jealous but this guy is just a bit too cool.

Until 10 January 2010.
Information: 0844 875 0073,
www.haywardgallery.org.uk

Ed Ruscha: Fifty years of painting
Hayward Gallery
SE1