Sterling Ruby’s work is regarded as a reaction to and rejection of the minimalist artistic tradition. He has been proclaimed by contemporary art critics as one of the most interesting artists to emerge in the twentieth century due to his examination of the psychological sphere in which expression confronts constraint. Ruby’s works are clearly influenced by the ubiquity of urban graffiti and the artist’s works often appear defaced, camouflaged and disfigured. The artist has cited a diverse range of influences and sources in his oeuvre; such as psychological diseases, hip-hop culture, public art, waste, decline and consumption.

Among the disparate forms in Ruby’s practice; including ceramics, painting, collage and video, his canvases remain the most formally abstract. Each work is titled using the initials SP, which denote the method of spray painting, followed by a particular number unique to the specific work. The large-scale, colour-field canvases are made with acrylic and spray paint and utilise a varied, almost hallucinogenic colour palette, which ranges from deep black to acid pinks and greens. The artist connects his involvement in the abstract movement with the themes he depicts in his paintings. Drawing inspiration from the sociological implications of urban vandalism and demarcation, he associates the power struggles involved in gang behaviour to the demolishment of clear order and loss of original meaning and authority pertinent to abstract art itself.

SP33, created by the artist in 2008, is an abstract piece that uses these characteristic techniques. The painting features two blocks of bold colour, surmounted by a repeated, black linear pattern, distorted and blurred in a circular formation in the centre third of the canvas. As characteristic of all Ruby’s paintings, it is executed using spray paint on a large-format canvas. It features a restricted palette and different application techniques on various, accumulative levels. The depicted colours give the piece an unnatural almost otherworldly appearance. This effect is emphasised in the manipulation of the image, resulting from the blurring technique, which disturbs the tranquillity and cohesive quality of the work. The work is evocative of the kind of image that is perceived when looking through a telescope. The distortion of the image is an intentional technique that aims to increase the ambiguity of the work. Ruby states: "I want it to be transient, even if I don’t know if that’s a quality. My work is not goal driven. It’s not to get to an end point. You have this drive and that keeps you going, but the drive isn’t necessarily based on a definitive definition or a definitive endpoint. Like: I want to reach a goal and accomplish this, so that it’s completely explained. I don’t actually find that to be interesting. There’s a perception of that, in all of the work, but it’s actually about the cyclical aspect of it. About the fact that it’s never attained. That it’s never an endpoint. That seems very dramatic and kind of upsetting, but in my mind it’s very desirable. And beautiful, to a certain extent." (Utopia Parkway I Like The Fact That Art Can’t Be Proven, www.utopiaparkway.wordpress.com).

Ruby’s explanation of the work as a symbol of transience highlights the importance of its indefinite meaning. The vibrant and eclectic work, through its manipulation and contortion, belies an unfinished sensation. This lack of a completed aura can be taken to evoke either some sort of structural breakdown or the beginning of some new, tantalising possibility. In this way, his works can be interpreted as a form of assault on both materials and social power structures along with the introduction of a solution that remains just out of reach. The way in which the obscured elements of the piece do not hinder the final aesthetic beauty of the painting presents an artistic solution to the destruction of the contemporary world. Ruby introduces the possibility for the disclosure of aesthetic harmony within a mutilated whole. “Yes, I definitely feel that ‘beauty’ is a contemporary question. But I probably prefer to look at it this way, which is to view it by different standards. It’s interesting to see how beauty is represented and how different takes on beauty can be so dichotomous and different. I like to think about art as being similar to poetry: it can’t be proven. It just exists and there’s an aura about it that people get or don’t get. Beauty has to do a lot with that.”(Utopia Parkway Interview with Sabine Ruby, I Like The Fact That Art Can’t Be Proven www.utopiaparkway.wordpress.com).

This ephemeral gesture in Ruby’s paintings becomes the subject matter of the works themselves and categorises them as compulsive acts of expression. The art critic Bob Nickas has described Ruby’s work as a ‘dichotomy of repression and liberation’ (Nickas 2009, p.220). They channel the conflicts between individual impulses and mechanisms of the collective whole; depicting the moment of upheaval and its final outcome. Yet, in their post-humanist, contemporary qualities and subsequent feeling of continuum, they can be interpreted as the illustration of a coping strategy; a positive and alluring image of reality. “My generation is going through this dilemma of how beauty is prescribed. There’s this kind of aesthetic of degradation, of deterioration as a type of beauty. Like an entropic beauty. That’s perhaps very gothic or very baroque, to a certain extent. But it’s also a type of formalism or a type of negation on all of these different things that have happened prior to here and now.”