Seconals, Splinters

Ed Ruschas Seconals, Splinters from 1976 is a works on paper that exemplifies the artists radical approach to medium, combining gunpowder, red watercolor, and yellow pastel on white wove paper to create an image that is simultaneously text, material experiment, and meditation on the relationship between word and substance. The title pairs two words that share a consonant pattern, Seconals (a brand name for the barbiturate secobarbital) and Splinters (sharp fragments of broken wood), creating an associational chain that moves from pharmaceutical sedation to physical fragmentation. Ruscha has been exploring the intersection of word and image since the early 1960s, and by 1976 his investigation had extended to the material properties of the words themselves, testing whether the substance of the word could be made to correspond to the substance of the image through unconventional drawing materials. The use of gunpowder as a drawing medium is characteristic of Ruschas willingness to test the boundaries of what constitutes art material, transforming an explosive substance into a mark-making tool that produces a dry, granular line quite different from traditional charcoal or graphite. The red watercolor and yellow pastel add chromatic accents that interact with the gunpowder in ways that are both chemical and visual, creating a surface where the tension between word and substance is enacted at the level of material as well as meaning.

Ruschas gunpowder drawings from the 1970s are among his most radical material experiments, challenging the boundaries of traditional drawing media and demonstrating that unconventional materials could carry conceptual weight. Seconals, Splinters exemplifies the Los Angeles artists unique ability to make word-image investigations that are simultaneously funny, disturbing, and formally innovative.

A gunpowder, watercolor, and pastel drawing by Ruscha that pairs a pharmaceutical brand name with a word for fragmentation, using explosive material as a drawing medium to enact the tension between word and substance at both the semantic and material level.