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Lot Essay
'I've become interested in when something starts as an accident and then becomes a template for other things, or reproduces itself and generates its own logic until something else intervenes to change it' (W. Guyton, quoted in S. Rothkopf, 'Modern Pictures', Color, Power & Style, exh. cat., Der Kunstverein, Hamburg, 2006).
Comprised of delicate striations of diaphanous grey pigment, Wade Guyton's Untitled challenges the pre-conceived notions of the limits of abstraction by employing the formal structure and appearance of Modernist painting through contemporary technology. Perpetually blurring the line between the artist's intent and technological will, Guyton's monochromatic paintings document the process of their own creation, stress the inane fallibility of machines, and provide a semblance of the pictorial incident and life. As Guyton recently said of these works, 'the works on linen are a record of their own making which at times can include accidents in the printing or in the physical act of making them, like when I drag a canvas across a studio floor' (W. Guyton, quoted in C. Vogel, 'Painting, Rebooted', in The New York Times, 27 September 2012). In its documentation of the skips, skids, stutters and smears that inadvertently occur during the printing process, Guyton's inkjet medium paradoxically betrays a singularity or individuality in the face of mechanisation that encourages viewer engagement. The gradual unloading of ink by the printer's carriage creates a variegated effect, appearing to capture a moment of stasis. Guyton first began experimenting with printing on linen in 2006. The present work was created by physically pulling the vast swathe of linen fabric through an ink-jet printer. Working on a larger scale than his technology would allow, Guyton folded the linen, executing the computer file on one side and then the other; the resulting image has a bisecting line that simultaneously unites the mimetic bands on either side and fractures the work. The slate-grey horizontal bands create a hypnotic effect, encouraging the eye to skip down the entire vertiginous length of the composition. Reminiscent of the scanning of a photocopying machine, Untitled is fractured by a thin glowing vertical line. With its impenetrable central vertical seam and its fine horizontal lines multiplied down the length of the linen, Untitled sparks allusions from the history of twentieth century Abstraction-from Kazimir Malevich's black on black, to the 'zip' of a Barnett Newman, to the restrained linear coordinates of Agnes Martin's spiritual Minimalism. Guyton has simultaneously considered the monochrome paintings of the 1960s by artists such as Brice Marden and Robert Mangold, while also allowing his works to take on the more unexpected markings of fugitive lines or unintentional ink drips from his machine, thus registering the work's very facture. Of his practice Guyton notes, 'this is a recording process as much as a production process. And I have to live with it, smears and all' (W. Guyton, quoted in C. Vogel, 'Painting, Rebooted', in The New York Times, 27 September 2012).
Comprised of delicate striations of diaphanous grey pigment, Wade Guyton's Untitled challenges the pre-conceived notions of the limits of abstraction by employing the formal structure and appearance of Modernist painting through contemporary technology. Perpetually blurring the line between the artist's intent and technological will, Guyton's monochromatic paintings document the process of their own creation, stress the inane fallibility of machines, and provide a semblance of the pictorial incident and life. As Guyton recently said of these works, 'the works on linen are a record of their own making which at times can include accidents in the printing or in the physical act of making them, like when I drag a canvas across a studio floor' (W. Guyton, quoted in C. Vogel, 'Painting, Rebooted', in The New York Times, 27 September 2012). In its documentation of the skips, skids, stutters and smears that inadvertently occur during the printing process, Guyton's inkjet medium paradoxically betrays a singularity or individuality in the face of mechanisation that encourages viewer engagement. The gradual unloading of ink by the printer's carriage creates a variegated effect, appearing to capture a moment of stasis. Guyton first began experimenting with printing on linen in 2006. The present work was created by physically pulling the vast swathe of linen fabric through an ink-jet printer. Working on a larger scale than his technology would allow, Guyton folded the linen, executing the computer file on one side and then the other; the resulting image has a bisecting line that simultaneously unites the mimetic bands on either side and fractures the work. The slate-grey horizontal bands create a hypnotic effect, encouraging the eye to skip down the entire vertiginous length of the composition. Reminiscent of the scanning of a photocopying machine, Untitled is fractured by a thin glowing vertical line. With its impenetrable central vertical seam and its fine horizontal lines multiplied down the length of the linen, Untitled sparks allusions from the history of twentieth century Abstraction-from Kazimir Malevich's black on black, to the 'zip' of a Barnett Newman, to the restrained linear coordinates of Agnes Martin's spiritual Minimalism. Guyton has simultaneously considered the monochrome paintings of the 1960s by artists such as Brice Marden and Robert Mangold, while also allowing his works to take on the more unexpected markings of fugitive lines or unintentional ink drips from his machine, thus registering the work's very facture. Of his practice Guyton notes, 'this is a recording process as much as a production process. And I have to live with it, smears and all' (W. Guyton, quoted in C. Vogel, 'Painting, Rebooted', in The New York Times, 27 September 2012).