Mel Bochner — Obliterate For Sale

Obliterate belongs to a cluster of words and phrases — alongside "blah" and "ass backwards" — that recurred throughout the later years of Mel Bochner's text-based painting practice, each one pushed to the point where legibility and pure visual mark-making begin to collapse into one another. Where much of Bochner's Thesaurus work builds outward through lists of synonyms, Obliterate takes the opposite approach, using the word's own meaning as a structural principle: the text is layered, overwritten and visually eroded until it becomes difficult to read cleanly.

A 2018 silkscreen edition, printed in twelve or thirteen colours on Lanaquarelle paper, was produced in an edition of 30 measuring 50 x 40 inches — a technically demanding print requiring dozens of registration passes to build up the density of colour beneath the fractured text. In a 2019 review of Bochner's exhibition of related paintings, ARTnews described the recurring motif as a word or phrase "obliterated into a palimpsest of illegibility" across the canvas, a phrase that captures how the work functions less as a readable statement than as a record of its own gradual erasure.

Continuing Bochner's long-standing interest in the point where language stops functioning as communication and starts functioning as image, Obliterate asks what remains of a word once its meaning has been visually undone.