Mel Bochner — Ha Ha Ha For Sale

Ha Ha Ha distils Mel Bochner's Thesaurus paintings down to a single vocalised sound, repeated across the canvas as both text and image. Rather than stacking synonyms for a word, as in works like Blah Blah Blah, Bochner here uses the repeated syllable "Ha" as a visual stand-in for laughter itself, extending his long-running interest in how spoken, informal language can be rendered as a purely graphic form.

A painted version from 2017–2019, executed in oil, water-based ink and UV screenprint ink on paper and measuring 72 x 51 3/4 inches, sets white repeating text against dark, layered midnight-blue and black grounds built up through multiple UV screenprint passes — a labour-intensive process that gives the surface a dense, almost bruised depth beneath the bright, cartoonish text. From around 2022, Bochner also produced Ha Ha Ha as individual monoprints in oil with collage, engraving and embossment on hand-dyed handmade paper, with each sheet a unique work rather than part of a numbered edition, allowing colour and texture to vary piece by piece.

The title's repeated syllables deliberately withhold their emotional register: read one way, the laughter feels warm and infectious; read another, it tips toward mockery or unease. That ambiguity — is this laughing with, or laughing at? — sits at the centre of Bochner's ongoing investigation into how tone survives, or doesn't, when language is stripped of context and rendered as pure visual mark.