Ed Ruscha's Yes (1984) places a single word across one of his most cinematically charged grounds — diagonal parallelograms of amber and orange light cut across a deep black field, the shapes suggesting sunlight falling through venetian blinds or a car window at speed. Y sits large and pink at the left edge, E blue-grey in the centre, s tiny and pale at the lower right, the three characters descending in scale as they move across the image, the word diminishing as it travels.

The ground is the key to this work. Those warm amber diagonals are unmistakably Californian — the particular quality of late afternoon light filtered through horizontal slats, the kind of interior light that appears in a parked car or a room with the blinds half-drawn. Ruscha had been absorbing the light conditions of Los Angeles since 1956, and by 1984 that light had become part of his formal vocabulary in the way that the Standard Station's geometry or the Mountain Series's alpine scale were formal vocabularies — specific, recognisable, carrying a precise geographical and emotional register.

Into that light he places YES — or rather Y, E, s, each letter a different size and colour, the word scattered across the field. The affirmation is present but distributed, the letters behaving less like a word than like three separate objects that happen, when read left to right, to spell one. The s, small and pale at the lower right, barely arrives. YES as a statement has absolute clarity; this version hedges, the certainty of the word undermined by the scale of its final character, the smallest and most tentative letter carrying the most semantic weight.

For more information or to buy Yes by Ed Ruscha, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.

Browse Ed Ruscha signed prints for sale, or enquire about selling Ed Ruscha prints.