F House

From his earlies experinces as a sign painter, Ed Ruscha delveoped an abiding interest in the visual and conceptual tensions between text and image. In the late 1980s, he produced a succession of airbrush paintings featureing nocturnal, silhouetted images dereived from photographs. F House can be seen as an exploration of the relationship between photography and painting; the block-style letter F that floats on the house may even allude to the f-stop on a camera. the superimposition of the red motif over the house could also imply surveillance by means of a telescopic lens, or perhaps even the stop of a gun. Suggesting intrustive examination and potentila harm, the image evokes scenes from Hollywood suspense thrillers and infuses a vision of middle-class prospertity unsettling, prehaps malevolent, overtones.