Years Months Weeks

As the main representative of West Coast Pop Art since the 1960s, Ed Ruscha’s work expresses his fascination with the vast landscapes of modern American life. Working in a variety of media, ranging from painting to engravings, photography, film, and publishing, he depicts the influence of the Hollywood movie industry and Los Angeles’ pop culture.

Years Months Weeks forms part of a series that the artist made in 2016 titled Extremes and In-Betweens, in which the artist plays with the scale of the text as a visual sign and system of words encompassing concepts that are difficult to represent. Science, universe, time are some of the abstract themes that have been segmented by a hierarchical language.

Years Months Weeks literally addresses the relentless passage of time. Made using Ruscha’s trademark "Boy Scout Utility Modern” font, the words shrink and seem to fly by like seconds, becoming almost illegible at the bottom of the canvas. Ordered against a neutral background, a powdery grey-beige nothing, the words are shown colourless, in the negative. It then becomes clear that this is not so much a question of making tangible what cannot be materialised, rather establishing relationships of typographic scale in relation to the surface of the painting. “I like the idea that a word becomes an image, that it almost leaves its body before returning and once again becoming a word”, the artist has said.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, as part of the exhibition Forever Sixties

*Ed Ruscha, in Calvin Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.”, The New Yorker, 24 Juin 2013 : “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again”.