Baby Jet (2023) is barely there. Dense horizontal lines run across the entire plate, and BABY above JET emerge from them not as positive marks but as absences — the letterforms cut through the striations as pale space, the words legible only because the lines stop where the letters are. The effect is somewhere between a corrupted transmission and a surface that has been worn down to its last layer. You read it, but only just.

The phrase had appeared in Ruscha's work before — the Mountain Series lithograph of 2011 placed BABY JET in clean white capitals across a blazing orange and purple peak, confident and immediate. This 2023 etching, produced as part of the six-print hard ground suite in an edition of forty, gives the same phrase the opposite treatment. Where the earlier version declared, this one recedes. The words are present but barely holding, the horizontal interference almost winning.

That tension — between legibility and dissolution, assertion and disappearance — runs through the entire 2023 etching suite, but Baby Jet pushes it furthest. The serif letterforms are large enough to dominate the composition in principle; in practice they are consumed by the plate work around them, the lines dense enough in places to read as solid grey, the text emerging and retreating depending on how far you stand from it. Ruscha had apprenticed in printmaking under Saul Marks in Los Angeles in 1958, and the hard ground etching process — one of the medium's most demanding — gives him precisely this kind of control: the ability to determine exactly how much of a word survives the surface it is pressed into.

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