Ed Ruscha’s The Old Tech-Chem Building, 2003 (detail; full image below). — Ed Ruscha’s The Old Tech-Chem Building, 2003 *(detail; full image below)*. Photograph: Paul Ruscha/© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s The Old Tech-Chem Building: a dehumanised landscape

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The American artist known for his word paintings and social commentary reflects on ecological disaster with apocalyptic red skies

Writing on the wall …

This 2003 airbrushed canvas comes from Course of Empire, two series of paintings by Ed Ruscha, the master of landscapes reduced to cool, sharp graphics, word painting and sly social commentary.

Simple pleasures …

The first black-and-white “Blue Collar” works from 1992 depict Los Angeles’s low-rise industrial buildings. The “Tech-Chem” paintings revisit these sites, 11 years on, in colour. With the simplest means, Ruscha creates an epic saga of civilisation in a tailspin.

Fat of the land …

In the painting’s older twin, the building bears the logo “TECH-CHEM”. Its use is more obscure in this later version, though the words Fat Boy are ripe with allusions – to the nicknames of the nuclear bombs the US dropped on Japan, bloated imperial power, the west’s obesity “epidemic”.

Apocalypse wow …

This dehumanised landscape is subject only to the shifting forces of business. As with Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle of paintings of the same name, ecological disaster remains the endpoint of imperial plundering. The skies glow an apocalyptic blood red.