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Lot Essay
'Pollock flung it; Rauschenberg silkscreened it; Richter took a squeegee; Polke used chemicals. Wade is working in what is now a pretty venerable tradition, against the conventional idea of painting' (A. Temkin, quoted in C. Vogel, 'Painting, Rebooted', in The New York Times, 27 September 2012).
'The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out; the canvases pile up on the floor. I'm rough with them because they're bigger than I am, and often it's just me working alone, so I'm dragging them around. Whatever happens when I'm making them is part of the work' (W. Guyton, quoted in D. De Salvo, 'Interview', Wade Guyton:OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 208).
Studded with a succession of striking 'X' motifs, Wade Guyton's Untitled is a dynamic mix of painterly tradition infused with modern technology. In her review of Guyton's recent retrospective at the New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, chief art critic Roberta Smith described the artist as 'a traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a different configuration' (R. Smith, 'Dots, Stripes, Scans', New York Times, 4 October 2012). In Untitled, Guyton builds on the rich tradition of painterly innovation during the twentieth century (and the modern appropriations of those traditions by artists such as Andy Warhol and members of the Pictures Generation), and produces a work which is bursting with enigmatic intrigue whilst retaining the supremacy of the painted surface. Deeply rooted in art history, Guyton remains indebted to the aesthetics of the Modernist tradition and to the Postmodernist artists by re-inventing appropriation art whilst respecting the formal repertoire of minimal and conceptual art. Examples of his work are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.
Guyton adorns this imposing canvas with a series of giant 'X' motifs, repeated at regular intervals across the canvas. Based on the generic fonts found in Microsoft Word, Guyton manipulates their layout to produce his desired aesthetic effect, and then using one of the largest commercial printers available prints them onto the canvas. It is during this printing process that Guyton's canvases comes to life as the artist embraces the inherent snags and hitches with printing onto canvas on such a large scale, as the strict formalism of the 'X' motifs becomes adorned and embellished with a series of 'painterly' drips and smears unique to each canvas. Untitled is distinguished by a particularly rich range of these 'imperfections,' marks that manifest themselves as a series of Pollock-like 'drips' that inhabit almost every 'X' in the left hand portion of the canvas. This is complimented by the 'X' motifs in the right hand side of the canvas whose forms appear to be much purer, apart from a notable series of smears in the lower right that rise like flames into the air. Running down the centre of the work, almost undetected to the human eye, is a thin line of unprinted canvas caused by the fact that Guyton has had to fold the canvas in half before beginning the printing process in order to accommodate the maximum width of commercial printers. He then turns the canvas over and prints the other side - never quite matching up the two sides so that they record what Roberta Smith describes as 'the process of their own making, stress the almost human infallibility of machines and provide a semblance of pictorial incident and life' (R. Smith, ibid). Guyton openly acknowledges the importance that this infallibility plays in his work. Once printing begins, he embraces an infinite number of possibilities that his process might produce as being central to the final aesthetic. 'The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out; the canvases pile up on the floor. I'm rough with them because they're bigger than I am, and often it's just me working alone, so I'm dragging them around. Whatever happens when I'm making them is part of the work' (W. Guyton, quoted in D. De Salvo, 'Interview', Wade Guyton: OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 208).
The 'X' is a recurring motif in Guyton's work, appearing as a marking of a window on a photograph, a sculptural intervention in urban space and lastly on canvas. By placing the black 'X' on the white canvas Guyton uses an image between abstraction and function. But the 'X' remains a signifier without meaning, as Johanna Burton writes: 'They are too easily generalized to be attributed to any singular context and, because of this, are not naturally of any context at all' (J. Burton, 'Such Uneventful Events: The Work of Wade Guyton', Y. Dziewior (ed.), Formalism, Modern Art, Today, exh. cat., Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, 2004, p. 59).
Guyton remains the quintessential twenty-first century artist. His paintings follow in the venerable tradition of many of the greats of the twentieth century art historical canon, pushing the boundaries of convention and utilizing modern technology to achieve new aesthetic visions. As Scott Rothkopf, the curator of Guyton's Whitney retrospective sums up 'He has figured a way to make work that deals with technology but doesn't feel tricky or techie, rather it's intuitive. It's abstract on one hand and Pop on the other' but doesn't feel tricky or techie, rather it's intuitive. It's abstract on one hand and Pop on the other' (S. Rothkopf, quoted in C. Vogel, 'Painting, Rebooted', in The New York Times, 27 September 2012).
'The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out; the canvases pile up on the floor. I'm rough with them because they're bigger than I am, and often it's just me working alone, so I'm dragging them around. Whatever happens when I'm making them is part of the work' (W. Guyton, quoted in D. De Salvo, 'Interview', Wade Guyton:OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 208).
Studded with a succession of striking 'X' motifs, Wade Guyton's Untitled is a dynamic mix of painterly tradition infused with modern technology. In her review of Guyton's recent retrospective at the New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, chief art critic Roberta Smith described the artist as 'a traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a different configuration' (R. Smith, 'Dots, Stripes, Scans', New York Times, 4 October 2012). In Untitled, Guyton builds on the rich tradition of painterly innovation during the twentieth century (and the modern appropriations of those traditions by artists such as Andy Warhol and members of the Pictures Generation), and produces a work which is bursting with enigmatic intrigue whilst retaining the supremacy of the painted surface. Deeply rooted in art history, Guyton remains indebted to the aesthetics of the Modernist tradition and to the Postmodernist artists by re-inventing appropriation art whilst respecting the formal repertoire of minimal and conceptual art. Examples of his work are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.
Guyton adorns this imposing canvas with a series of giant 'X' motifs, repeated at regular intervals across the canvas. Based on the generic fonts found in Microsoft Word, Guyton manipulates their layout to produce his desired aesthetic effect, and then using one of the largest commercial printers available prints them onto the canvas. It is during this printing process that Guyton's canvases comes to life as the artist embraces the inherent snags and hitches with printing onto canvas on such a large scale, as the strict formalism of the 'X' motifs becomes adorned and embellished with a series of 'painterly' drips and smears unique to each canvas. Untitled is distinguished by a particularly rich range of these 'imperfections,' marks that manifest themselves as a series of Pollock-like 'drips' that inhabit almost every 'X' in the left hand portion of the canvas. This is complimented by the 'X' motifs in the right hand side of the canvas whose forms appear to be much purer, apart from a notable series of smears in the lower right that rise like flames into the air. Running down the centre of the work, almost undetected to the human eye, is a thin line of unprinted canvas caused by the fact that Guyton has had to fold the canvas in half before beginning the printing process in order to accommodate the maximum width of commercial printers. He then turns the canvas over and prints the other side - never quite matching up the two sides so that they record what Roberta Smith describes as 'the process of their own making, stress the almost human infallibility of machines and provide a semblance of pictorial incident and life' (R. Smith, ibid). Guyton openly acknowledges the importance that this infallibility plays in his work. Once printing begins, he embraces an infinite number of possibilities that his process might produce as being central to the final aesthetic. 'The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out; the canvases pile up on the floor. I'm rough with them because they're bigger than I am, and often it's just me working alone, so I'm dragging them around. Whatever happens when I'm making them is part of the work' (W. Guyton, quoted in D. De Salvo, 'Interview', Wade Guyton: OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 208).
The 'X' is a recurring motif in Guyton's work, appearing as a marking of a window on a photograph, a sculptural intervention in urban space and lastly on canvas. By placing the black 'X' on the white canvas Guyton uses an image between abstraction and function. But the 'X' remains a signifier without meaning, as Johanna Burton writes: 'They are too easily generalized to be attributed to any singular context and, because of this, are not naturally of any context at all' (J. Burton, 'Such Uneventful Events: The Work of Wade Guyton', Y. Dziewior (ed.), Formalism, Modern Art, Today, exh. cat., Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, 2004, p. 59).
Guyton remains the quintessential twenty-first century artist. His paintings follow in the venerable tradition of many of the greats of the twentieth century art historical canon, pushing the boundaries of convention and utilizing modern technology to achieve new aesthetic visions. As Scott Rothkopf, the curator of Guyton's Whitney retrospective sums up 'He has figured a way to make work that deals with technology but doesn't feel tricky or techie, rather it's intuitive. It's abstract on one hand and Pop on the other' but doesn't feel tricky or techie, rather it's intuitive. It's abstract on one hand and Pop on the other' (S. Rothkopf, quoted in C. Vogel, 'Painting, Rebooted', in The New York Times, 27 September 2012).