Breathtaking in its elegant simplicity, Folded Paper is an exquisite example of Los Angeles-based artist Ed Rucha's illusionistic rendering of trompe l'oile effects. Executed in 1973, the work exemplifies the artist's extensive focus on paper as a medium and subject matter during this period. The present work is a culmination of this prolific and exceptionally creative outpouring, which began with the inception of the so-called ‘ribbon words’ of the late 1960s. In the context of 1960s Pop and with a background in advertising and commercial art, Ruscha’s initial interest in signage, logos and text evolved into a purist fascination with typeface as subject matter itself. Isolating the words from their inherent meanings and illustrating them as shapes alone. ‘I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again,’ Ruscha explains.ⁱ Words with meanings as varied as evil, hog, palm, cement and life were suspended across the sheet, twirling like silken ribbon, or more commonly undulating like thin strips of paper.

 

By 1971, Ruscha made the step to replace the word with the sheet itself in a new series of works; as described by Lisa Turvey, ‘they might be understood as another iteration of him portraying the support on which he worked, a shift from drawing words that look like they are made of paper to wordless drawings of paper itself'ⁱⁱ. The first examples depicted sheets suspended and hovering, later zooming across the page, tumbling from the sky and latterly folded and imposing. Two comparable works titled Hot Folded Sheet and Hot Sheets from 1973 denote the importance this subject to Ruscha. The artist ‘used the word “hot” to characterize those projects or themes that most captured his attention, that demanded sustained engagement’. ⁱⁱⁱ The present work echoes the composition of Hot Folded Sheet, but the paper is mirrored, and it is the first example where Ruscha omits taped margins and fully extends the background, a compositional preference he has favoured to the present day.
 

The depiction of a blank folded sheet of paper as the central focus of the composition speaks to the absurdist qualities which can be identified in Ruscha’s practise. Ruscha’s playful presentation of objects, words, and phrases entirely removed from their original context recall’s Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s approach to his Readymades, such as his early Bicycle Wheel from 1913. Reclaiming and recombining found objects in a set of new, unexpected relationships, Duchamp attached a wheel from a bicycle to the seat of a wooden stool, rendering both unfunctional in their original forms and radically redefining the assumed definitions of art and artmaking.

 

Through the works on paper from this period, Ruscha further expanded these parameters. Utilising, food, chemicals, and – perhaps most famously – gunpowder, Ruscha separated these materials from their original varied uses and distilled them to pure pigment on a page. The similarities between Duchamp and Ruscha’s practice end in their handling of media, and one of Ruscha’s most celebrated skills is his ability to adroitly disguise the process of creation in his works.

“Stated baldly, Ruscha’s drawings often don’t look like drawings. So deft is his pictorial prestidigitation, so sophisticated his effects, that his graphite and gunpowder drawings have been confused for prints and photographs, and his pastel drawings mistaken for watercolours.”
—Lisa Turvey

Folded Sheet is a masterwork in illusionistic rendering. At this time, Ruscha perfected a technique of taping off the negative space and working around the outline with an X-ACTO knife. The media was worked into the background with such fervour that the paper absorbed the pigment, and each stroke is indistinguishable from another. Magically, ‘the object figured as three-dimensional is actually the flattest and least worked area of the support’ and in the case of the present work, the folded paper protrudes from picture plane and the boundless background extends beyond view. Ruscha’s exceptional handling and obvious enthusiasm for media and subject matter contribute to the extensive appeal of this series of work, of which Folded Sheet is a seminal example.

 

 

Collector’s digest 

 

• Based in L.A., Ed Ruscha’s career spans over 50 years across a variety of mediums and has become representative of a kind of American idealism.
   

• Ruscha’s career was celebrated in the major retrospective ED RUSCHA NOW/THEN, which travelled from The Museum of Modern Art, New York to Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 2023-2024. Exhibited were over 250 works encompassing painting, drawing, prints, photography, artist’s books, film, and installation.
   

• The artist’s works on paper are currently the focus of a solo exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum, in Ruscha’s birthplace of Omaha Nebraska. Ed Ruscha: Paper runs until 23 February 2025.

 

 

ⁱ Ed Ruscha, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, "Ed Ruscha’s L.A.," The New Yorker, 24 June 2013, online

ⁱⁱ Lisa Turvey, Edward Ruscha, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper Volume One: 1956-1976, New York, 2014, p. 31.

ⁱⁱⁱ Lisa Turvey, Edward Ruscha, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper Volume One: 1956-1976, New York, 2014, p. 31.