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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’, in Colour, Power & Style, exh. cat., Kunstverein, Hamburg, 2006, n.p.).
‘Guyton’s large new paintings exude a kind of haphazard grandeur, the result of constant negotiation between technical failure and mastery, physical accident and control’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘Modern Pictures’, in Colour, Power & Style, exh. cat., Kunstverein, Hamburg, 2006, n.p.).
Studded with a staccato succession of striking ‘X’ motifs, Wade Guyton’s Untitled, 2006, is a dynamic mix of painterly tradition infused with modern technology. The canvas appears as if divided into two sides by a thin line which is devoid of colour: the mechanical rows and clusters of black X’s scatter and skip across the expanse of white, their forms interrupted, overlapping, disconnected and interspersed. 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 ‘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.
Described by the artist as a painting, this large-scale work has been created without paint or brush but by feeding the primed canvas through an industrial printer. At times forcing or dragging, Guyton provokes accidents to distort the elegant simplicity of the image, manipulating the printer to stain the linen initially according to a digital file. Part of a series of work conceived for his first solo exhibition in New York, Guyton reacts directly to the space of the gallery by substantially increasing the size of his works. This required the artist to overcome the obstacles inherent in his practice and determined by the limitations of the printer. It is during this printing process that Guyton’s canvases comes to life as the artist embraces the inevitable snags and hitches created by printing onto canvas on such a large scale. Guyton has been relying on printers to create work since 2000, when he first started his ‘drawing’ series: found imagery torn out of a mixture of primary sources (exhibition catalogues, monographs and architecture books) with printed images, often geometric shapes, layered over them. The ‘X’ however remains a signifier without meaning, situated somewhere between language and abstraction. 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).
Once printing begins, Guyton embraces the infinite number of possibilities inherent in his process. As the artist has described, ‘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). Running down the centre of the work, almost undetected to the human eye, is a thin line of unprinted canvas produced by folding and taping the double-width canvas. He then turns the canvas over and prints the other side to record what chief art critic 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, ‘Dots, Stripes, Scans’, New York Times, 4 October 2012).
Guyton remains the quintessential twenty-first century artist. In her review of Guyton’s recent retrospective at the New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, 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’, in The New York Times, 4 October 2012). Deeply rooted in art history, Guyton remains indebted to the aesthetics of the Modernist tradition and Postmodernism, re-inventing appropriation art whilst respecting the formal repertoire of minimal and conceptual art. As Scott Rothkopf, the curator of Guyton’s Whitney retrospective suggests: [Guyton] 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’ (S. Rothkopf, quoted in C. Vogel, ‘Painting, Rebooted’, in The New York Times, 27 September 2012). Referencing as much Andy Warhol’s printing processes as the appropriation strategies of the Pictures Generation, in Untitled, Guyton builds on the rich tradition of painterly innovation during the twentieth century to produce a work which is bursting with enigmatic intrigue whilst retaining the supremacy of the painted surface.
‘Guyton’s large new paintings exude a kind of haphazard grandeur, the result of constant negotiation between technical failure and mastery, physical accident and control’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘Modern Pictures’, in Colour, Power & Style, exh. cat., Kunstverein, Hamburg, 2006, n.p.).
Studded with a staccato succession of striking ‘X’ motifs, Wade Guyton’s Untitled, 2006, is a dynamic mix of painterly tradition infused with modern technology. The canvas appears as if divided into two sides by a thin line which is devoid of colour: the mechanical rows and clusters of black X’s scatter and skip across the expanse of white, their forms interrupted, overlapping, disconnected and interspersed. 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 ‘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.
Described by the artist as a painting, this large-scale work has been created without paint or brush but by feeding the primed canvas through an industrial printer. At times forcing or dragging, Guyton provokes accidents to distort the elegant simplicity of the image, manipulating the printer to stain the linen initially according to a digital file. Part of a series of work conceived for his first solo exhibition in New York, Guyton reacts directly to the space of the gallery by substantially increasing the size of his works. This required the artist to overcome the obstacles inherent in his practice and determined by the limitations of the printer. It is during this printing process that Guyton’s canvases comes to life as the artist embraces the inevitable snags and hitches created by printing onto canvas on such a large scale. Guyton has been relying on printers to create work since 2000, when he first started his ‘drawing’ series: found imagery torn out of a mixture of primary sources (exhibition catalogues, monographs and architecture books) with printed images, often geometric shapes, layered over them. The ‘X’ however remains a signifier without meaning, situated somewhere between language and abstraction. 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).
Once printing begins, Guyton embraces the infinite number of possibilities inherent in his process. As the artist has described, ‘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). Running down the centre of the work, almost undetected to the human eye, is a thin line of unprinted canvas produced by folding and taping the double-width canvas. He then turns the canvas over and prints the other side to record what chief art critic 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, ‘Dots, Stripes, Scans’, New York Times, 4 October 2012).
Guyton remains the quintessential twenty-first century artist. In her review of Guyton’s recent retrospective at the New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, 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’, in The New York Times, 4 October 2012). Deeply rooted in art history, Guyton remains indebted to the aesthetics of the Modernist tradition and Postmodernism, re-inventing appropriation art whilst respecting the formal repertoire of minimal and conceptual art. As Scott Rothkopf, the curator of Guyton’s Whitney retrospective suggests: [Guyton] 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’ (S. Rothkopf, quoted in C. Vogel, ‘Painting, Rebooted’, in The New York Times, 27 September 2012). Referencing as much Andy Warhol’s printing processes as the appropriation strategies of the Pictures Generation, in Untitled, Guyton builds on the rich tradition of painterly innovation during the twentieth century to produce a work which is bursting with enigmatic intrigue whilst retaining the supremacy of the painted surface.