Final Say (2023) is the most turbulent of the 2023 etching suite. Red and blue diagonal lines cut across the plate at a steep angle, FINAL above SAY below, the serif letterforms tilted to match the diagonal rush of the interference. Where the other prints in the series run their striations horizontally — lines that cross the text at right angles — here everything moves in the same direction, text and marks aligned in a single diagonal sweep from upper left to lower right. The phrase is almost consumed by its own momentum.

The title closes the suite and earns that position. FINAL SAY is a phrase about authority and conclusion — the last word, the decisive statement, the end of an argument — and Ruscha gives it the most destabilised treatment of the six, the letters barely holding together against the diagonal force running through them. The phrase asserts finality; the plate undermines it. That gap between what the words claim and what the image does is characteristic of how Ruscha had always treated his chosen text — not illustrating it, not contradicting it, but placing it in a context that opens it to more than one reading.

The two-colour printing — navy blue lines and red-orange lines crossing and combining — gives Final Say a warmth that Baby Jet, in monochrome, does not have. The red and blue together carry an American flag association that may or may not be intended; with Ruscha it is usually safest to assume that nothing is unintentional. A print called Final Say, in the colours of the American flag, made in 2023 by an artist in his mid-eighties who had been reading the language of American power since the Eisenhower administration, is not a neutral object.

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