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Lot Essay
'[Wade Guyton] is one of the first and most important artists of his generation to have been formed through the postmodern practice of appropriation and for whom abstraction has always existed, above all, as a reproduced image' (V. Pcoil, 'The American Action Painter,' La Salle de Bains, 2006).
Wade Guyton's diaphanous black and white veils use modern technology to rewrite the conventions of painting. Using some of the largest industrial ink-jet printers available, Guyton produces his enigmatic works by feeding wide stretches of raw canvases through the printer and watching the composition take shape. In the process Guyton challenges the conventional nature of art whilst celebrating the fallibility of modern technology. Constantly blurring the line between the artist's intent and technological will, Guyton's monochromatic paintings document the process of their own creation. With its skips, skids, stutters and smears, the possibilities of Guyton's inkjet medium generate tension in the painting as well as a subtle, disjunctive play that endows his work with vitality and keeps its viewer engaged.
"You tap a keyboard with one finger and this very large painting emerges. It's gone against everything we think of as a painting," states curator Ann Temkin. "There are so many historical landmarks that precede him, so many artists who took the traditional notion of painting in a new direction," Temkin goes on to clarify. "Pollock flung it; Rauschenberg silkscreened it; Richter took a squeegee; Polke used chemicals. Wade is working in what by now is a pretty venerable tradition, against the conventional idea of painting" (A. Temkin quoted in, R. Smith, 'Dots, Stripes, Scans: Wade Guyton at the Whitney Museum of American Art,' New York Times, 4 October 2012).
Wade Guyton's diaphanous black and white veils use modern technology to rewrite the conventions of painting. Using some of the largest industrial ink-jet printers available, Guyton produces his enigmatic works by feeding wide stretches of raw canvases through the printer and watching the composition take shape. In the process Guyton challenges the conventional nature of art whilst celebrating the fallibility of modern technology. Constantly blurring the line between the artist's intent and technological will, Guyton's monochromatic paintings document the process of their own creation. With its skips, skids, stutters and smears, the possibilities of Guyton's inkjet medium generate tension in the painting as well as a subtle, disjunctive play that endows his work with vitality and keeps its viewer engaged.
"You tap a keyboard with one finger and this very large painting emerges. It's gone against everything we think of as a painting," states curator Ann Temkin. "There are so many historical landmarks that precede him, so many artists who took the traditional notion of painting in a new direction," Temkin goes on to clarify. "Pollock flung it; Rauschenberg silkscreened it; Richter took a squeegee; Polke used chemicals. Wade is working in what by now is a pretty venerable tradition, against the conventional idea of painting" (A. Temkin quoted in, R. Smith, 'Dots, Stripes, Scans: Wade Guyton at the Whitney Museum of American Art,' New York Times, 4 October 2012).