Jar of Olives Falling, 1969 affirms Edward Ruscha’s assertion that “paradox and absurdity have just always been really delicious to me.”⁽¹⁾ An aspect of the painting’s “absurdity” is its taking of objects that might appear in a still-life painting and rendering them, not resting on a table, but hurtling through space. “Space” seems to be the term that best approximates the light-to-dark olive green expanse surrounding the glass jar and its tumbling and spilling contents. The viewer receives no orientation, except the color values, which gradually darken from bottom to...