Cold Beer (2009) stacks four lines of white condensed capitals down a vertical format — COLD / BEER / BEAUTIFU / GIRLS — against a sky of dark drifting cloud, blue-grey and atmospheric, the same kind of turbulent ground that appears in That Was Then, This Is Now and Safe and Effective Medication. The text is a roadside advertisement in vertical format, the kind of sign that appears outside bars and diners across the American South and Midwest, promising cold beer and beautiful girls to anyone driving past. Except BEAUTIFUL has been truncated — BEAUTIFU, the L cut off at the right edge, the word incomplete.

That truncation is the work's central move. Everything else is intact — COLD BEER GIRLS all present and legible — but BEAUTIFUL loses its last letter, the adjective that does the most work in the sequence left unfinished. It reads like a sign with a letter missing, a billboard where the final character has peeled away or been painted over, the promise of beauty slightly damaged. Ruscha had been interested since the 1960s in the gap between what language claims and what it delivers, and here that gap is made literal: the word cannot complete itself.

The sky behind the text connects this work to a group of prints in which Ruscha places language against atmospheric grounds that carry their own emotional register — clouds that press against the inscription without explaining it. Cold Beer belongs in that company, the diner-sign vocabulary of desire and consumption set against weather that has nothing to do with cold beer or beautiful girls, the combination generating a tone that sits somewhere between humour and melancholy without settling in either.

Produced as a lithograph in 2009 in an edition of sixty plus fourteen artist's proofs, it is among the most immediately readable and quietly unsettling works in his output from that decade.

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