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Lot Essay
‘Fire is always captivating… Destructive, but also generative. And of course hot. There’s a great interaction between the image and the material in the fire paintings, which I didn’t predict, in the way the ink drips and runs. The first time I printed the fire on linen was one of those brutally humid New York summer nights. No AC in the studio. I was sweating and the paintings were melting’ (W. Guyton, quoted in interview with D. De Salvo, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 204).
Vividly incandescent flames lick the surface of Wade Guyton’s bold and mesmerizing Untitled. Two ‘U’ shapes hover above – one white-hot, the other burnt to a ghostly cinder – whilst rivulets of black ink melt enticingly into the surrounding expanse of white canvas. The work stems from the celebrated series of fire paintings that represent an important turning point within Guyton’s technological innovations. It was in 2005, the year of the present work, that the artist first began to exploit the Epsom inkjet printer as a tool for painting on canvas. These works extend from his earlier series of so-called ‘drawings’, initiated during the early 2000s, in which simple patterns created in Microsoft Word were printed directly onto paper pages ripped from his library of books. By transferring this method to canvas, Guyton was able to exploit the full potential of his revolutionary medium. Delighting in the bleeding, glitches and smudges that resulted from feeding primed linen through a printer, Guyton’s practice highlights the unlimited creative potential hidden within contemporary forms of mechanical reproduction. Interrogating the relationship between art and technology in the contemporary image-making, these works advance the enquiries set in motion by artists such as Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool.
The flame motif that defines the fire paintings stems from the artist’s earlier paper printing phase, and was originally torn from an old book cover. Guyton’s revival of this image stems from his desire to inject an element of pictorial content back into his increasingly abstract practice. Combined with the hazy drippings and blurred effects of his new printing method, the resulting paintings brought the flames to life in ways unimagined by the artist. ‘Fire is always captivating’, he claimed, ‘... Destructive, but also generative. And of course hot. There’s a great interaction between the image and the material in the fire paintings, which I didn’t predict, in the way the ink drips and runs. The first time I printed the fire on linen was one of those brutally humid New York summer nights. No AC in the studio. I was sweating and the paintings were melting’ (W. Guyton, quoted in interview with D. De Salvo, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 204). Guyton counteracts this figurative embodiment with his deliberately abstract lettering. In contrast to his use of the letter ‘X’, which has frequently been interpreted in symbolic terms, the letter ‘U’‘seemed sufficiently abstract… It felt like it could slip out of being a letter’ (W. Guyton, quoted in interview with D. De Salvo, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 204). This deliberate evasion of meaning foregrounds the visual quality of the letters, which appear to glow and combust beneath the red-hot flames.
Conceived as paintings in their own right, Guyton’s inkjet works are created through multiple stages. Guyton scans his chosen image – in this case, the flame-illustrated book cover – into his computer, often manipulating the file on screen. In the present work, the white ‘U’ appears to have been superimposed at this digital stage, whilst its shimmering burnished counterpart is the result of a further layer of printing. Guyton’s newly-acquired brand of high-quality primed linen, made in Provence, was ideally suited to registering ink, and thus allowed the artist to explore the painterly possibilities of the printer. As the machine attempted to digest the alien substance of the canvas, blurring, bleeding and skidding abounded, creating a new vocabulary of artistic nuances. Guyton was to become expert in prompting these effects, pulling and tugging the canvas to incite ruptures, schisms and errors in the printing process.
As well as their startling new interpretation of one of art’s most time-honoured mediums, the fire paintings also perform as a conceptual commentary on image-making. Guyton’s use of a ready-made image aligns his practice with the appropriation art of Richard Prince and the ‘Pictures Generation’. The original flame-illustrated book cover is transformed from a physical object into an image, its torn edges visible along its upper edge. The flames, in turn, are re-articulated as an image of an image. This double-remove directly addresses the question of artistic production in a contemporary world deeply saturated with images, suggesting a new vision for picture-making in the digital age. As Scott Rothkopf has written, ‘the interaction between the digital and the manual, the pictorial and the literal, have always been at the heart of Guyton’s practice and its deeply rooted connection to the ways in which we haltingly navigate the visual and technological barrage of our time’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘Operating System. I. From Image to Object’, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 25).
Vividly incandescent flames lick the surface of Wade Guyton’s bold and mesmerizing Untitled. Two ‘U’ shapes hover above – one white-hot, the other burnt to a ghostly cinder – whilst rivulets of black ink melt enticingly into the surrounding expanse of white canvas. The work stems from the celebrated series of fire paintings that represent an important turning point within Guyton’s technological innovations. It was in 2005, the year of the present work, that the artist first began to exploit the Epsom inkjet printer as a tool for painting on canvas. These works extend from his earlier series of so-called ‘drawings’, initiated during the early 2000s, in which simple patterns created in Microsoft Word were printed directly onto paper pages ripped from his library of books. By transferring this method to canvas, Guyton was able to exploit the full potential of his revolutionary medium. Delighting in the bleeding, glitches and smudges that resulted from feeding primed linen through a printer, Guyton’s practice highlights the unlimited creative potential hidden within contemporary forms of mechanical reproduction. Interrogating the relationship between art and technology in the contemporary image-making, these works advance the enquiries set in motion by artists such as Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool.
The flame motif that defines the fire paintings stems from the artist’s earlier paper printing phase, and was originally torn from an old book cover. Guyton’s revival of this image stems from his desire to inject an element of pictorial content back into his increasingly abstract practice. Combined with the hazy drippings and blurred effects of his new printing method, the resulting paintings brought the flames to life in ways unimagined by the artist. ‘Fire is always captivating’, he claimed, ‘... Destructive, but also generative. And of course hot. There’s a great interaction between the image and the material in the fire paintings, which I didn’t predict, in the way the ink drips and runs. The first time I printed the fire on linen was one of those brutally humid New York summer nights. No AC in the studio. I was sweating and the paintings were melting’ (W. Guyton, quoted in interview with D. De Salvo, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 204). Guyton counteracts this figurative embodiment with his deliberately abstract lettering. In contrast to his use of the letter ‘X’, which has frequently been interpreted in symbolic terms, the letter ‘U’‘seemed sufficiently abstract… It felt like it could slip out of being a letter’ (W. Guyton, quoted in interview with D. De Salvo, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 204). This deliberate evasion of meaning foregrounds the visual quality of the letters, which appear to glow and combust beneath the red-hot flames.
Conceived as paintings in their own right, Guyton’s inkjet works are created through multiple stages. Guyton scans his chosen image – in this case, the flame-illustrated book cover – into his computer, often manipulating the file on screen. In the present work, the white ‘U’ appears to have been superimposed at this digital stage, whilst its shimmering burnished counterpart is the result of a further layer of printing. Guyton’s newly-acquired brand of high-quality primed linen, made in Provence, was ideally suited to registering ink, and thus allowed the artist to explore the painterly possibilities of the printer. As the machine attempted to digest the alien substance of the canvas, blurring, bleeding and skidding abounded, creating a new vocabulary of artistic nuances. Guyton was to become expert in prompting these effects, pulling and tugging the canvas to incite ruptures, schisms and errors in the printing process.
As well as their startling new interpretation of one of art’s most time-honoured mediums, the fire paintings also perform as a conceptual commentary on image-making. Guyton’s use of a ready-made image aligns his practice with the appropriation art of Richard Prince and the ‘Pictures Generation’. The original flame-illustrated book cover is transformed from a physical object into an image, its torn edges visible along its upper edge. The flames, in turn, are re-articulated as an image of an image. This double-remove directly addresses the question of artistic production in a contemporary world deeply saturated with images, suggesting a new vision for picture-making in the digital age. As Scott Rothkopf has written, ‘the interaction between the digital and the manual, the pictorial and the literal, have always been at the heart of Guyton’s practice and its deeply rooted connection to the ways in which we haltingly navigate the visual and technological barrage of our time’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘Operating System. I. From Image to Object’, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 25).