As the most iconic image of his career, Ed Ruscha has repeatedly revisited this subject of the Standard gas station, exploring Americana through the topography of the highway. As a young man, driving back and forth in his 1950 Ford Sedan, along route 66 between his hometown of Oklahoma City and his new residence in Los Angeles, Ruscha first turned his camera out onto these fuel stops. The resulting black and white photographs became Ruscha’s first artist book, the groundbreaking Twentysix Gasoline Stations. From this collection, Ruscha selected one image which he would come to reinterpret for over fifty years: A Standard station in Amarillo, Texas.   

Evoking perhaps the inverse of a dramatic sunset, the cool-tones gradient background of Cheese Mold Standard with Olive was executed through a ‘split fountain’ screenprinting technique whereby two or more pools of different colored inks are pulled across the stencil and through the screen until the colors blend together under the pressure of the squeegee. Though the technique was commonplace in commercial printing at this time, Ruscha had become one of the first artists to deploy it in fine art printing; as the artist had been working on drawings at the time that used easily blended materials like pastel, he found the split fountain method useful in achieving the modulations of tone that were becoming a trademark of his style of draftsmanship. (Siri Engberg, “Out of Print: The Editions of Edward Ruscha, in Edward Ruscha Editions 1959-1999, 1999, p. 19) While Ruscha would later occasionally use foodstuff in place of inks for his prints, the title of this iteration of the Standard station comes from an association with the colors used, eliciting the tones that inflict a spoiled – or intentionally aged – block of cheese. Meanwhile, the titular olive is more directly engaged, floating inscrutably at the right edge of the image and rendered in a trompe l’oeil effect that punctures the deliberate flatness of Ruscha’s Standard composition.