ED RUSCHA: BUSTED GLASS - Wiebke Gronemeyer, Oct. 2007

ED RUSCHA: Busted Glass
at Gagosian Gallery, 17-19 Davies Street, London W1K 3DE; through 17 November, 2007.


In this new series of drawings Ed Ruscha resumes and assembles various approaches to articulate a both particular and peculiar moment of an infinite nothingness.

His drawings of popped, punctured, fractured and shattered glass are executed with such perfection on originating light and shadow that it almost creates a kind of a surreal reverie. Here, the centre of attention is not the edge of the glass as one could assume, since it is not only the most striking object to draw but furthermore the inevitable charac-teristic of shattered glass. Instead, in constantly emphasizing on the effectiveness of light and shadow with and over the background colour, the artist refuses to suggest a certain perspective of the broken material.

Ruscha likes to isolate objects, questioning their assumed connotations and thus dis-solving their meanings. He has no interest in letting the drawing emerge through an in-trospective process, rather he claims the object to be what it is – translucent, widening the visual field, which paradoxically as a reversal of this amplification loses itself in the background colour.

The artist has a talent for making the banal seem significant allowing ambiguity. His works do neither impose a certain notion, nor do they indicate an interpretation or fold in any kind of annotation.

Busted Glass evokes an interior gaze and mood, which amounts to an act of funambu-lation: the obviousness of the drawn object turns out to be resurrected by dismantling the hierarchy of both subject and medium. Hence, the created mysterious uncomfortableness turns to a self-reflective debate of art with itself on the discourse of Realism/Illusionism, exceptionally intensified by the chosen object of shattered glass.