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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.’
—ANN TEMKIN
‘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.’
—WADE GUYTON
‘One could call it a question of “series” or “seriality,” but I don’t often use those words. There’s repetition and possibly compulsion.’
—WADE GUYTON
The only triptych of the artist’s iconic ‘X’ forms in this size, Wade Guyton’s Untitled (2007) is a stunning, museum-quality example of the artist’s innovative practice: a work of exceptional visual power that stylishly explores the aesthetic boundaries of modern technology while examining the nature of the artist’s task in the twenty-first century. Three spare monochrome panels confront the viewer, the brilliant white of their canvases sliced through by razor-sharp, jet-black crosses; clinically identical in design, these crosses seem to replicate themselves across the panels like computer viruses. Yet the forms differ even as they repeat, as what should be a seamless digital reproduction is disfigured by the technological processes which translate them into physical reality: the crosses smudge, splinter and distort on the canvases, their clean lines blurring and jarring in strikingly austere compositions that are shaped equally by accident and design.
Guyton’s pioneering artistic process is at the heart of what he does: sending simple, iconographic designs through a large inkjet printer, Guyton repeatedly prints his images on pieces of linen. As the printer struggles to handle a material it was not designed for, his work records the resistances and malfunctions that occur; the printer jams and the ink runs out, the forms stuttering and fading on the page in remarkably painterly abstract compositions. In this unique triptych, Guyton produces a compelling study of his ‘X’ form and his process, transforming the cross into a single monumental motif that is subjected to a sequence of starkly beautiful variations: ink blurs into automated, shadowy patterns, fragments of line weld themselves to a host ‘X’ form, and crosses collide to form new geometric shapes, their vectors intersecting while their ink bleeds across each other. The work thus exists somewhere between an obscure linguistic or symbolic signification and abstract shape: as the meanings suggested by the ‘X’ begin to decay, their blurry formulation on the linen instead conjures a more intangible sense of mechanical failure and technological degradation.
The process calls into question the role of the artist in a world in which image production is ever more mechanised and automated; his art is the result of his interest in what happens, as he puts it, ‘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). Working in series, his arsenal of template forms – apart from the ‘X’, Guyton often uses a large ‘U’ shape, flames, and sets of straight lines, as well as pure black fields of ink – reproduce themselves across his oeuvre, eerie automations generated by some kind of technology given a life of its own. In this work however, Guyton stages this process within the bounds of one work, documenting the self-generating logic of his process with a simple, monolithic grandeur, as its central crosses mutate from panel to panel.
In this sense, Guyton creates a world in which technology carries out the artist’s process according to its own internal rules, technical breakdown imagined as an uncanny simulation of unconscious human error and experiment. And indeed, despite the apparent erasure of the painter’s hand, there is a fleeting sense of humanity in his works’ subtle references to older artistic traditions, both in its Warholian methodology, and in its slightly twisted recollection of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist styles of abstraction. Negotiating between man and machine, Untitled is a stark, impressive reflection of contemporary reality.
—ANN TEMKIN
‘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.’
—WADE GUYTON
‘One could call it a question of “series” or “seriality,” but I don’t often use those words. There’s repetition and possibly compulsion.’
—WADE GUYTON
The only triptych of the artist’s iconic ‘X’ forms in this size, Wade Guyton’s Untitled (2007) is a stunning, museum-quality example of the artist’s innovative practice: a work of exceptional visual power that stylishly explores the aesthetic boundaries of modern technology while examining the nature of the artist’s task in the twenty-first century. Three spare monochrome panels confront the viewer, the brilliant white of their canvases sliced through by razor-sharp, jet-black crosses; clinically identical in design, these crosses seem to replicate themselves across the panels like computer viruses. Yet the forms differ even as they repeat, as what should be a seamless digital reproduction is disfigured by the technological processes which translate them into physical reality: the crosses smudge, splinter and distort on the canvases, their clean lines blurring and jarring in strikingly austere compositions that are shaped equally by accident and design.
Guyton’s pioneering artistic process is at the heart of what he does: sending simple, iconographic designs through a large inkjet printer, Guyton repeatedly prints his images on pieces of linen. As the printer struggles to handle a material it was not designed for, his work records the resistances and malfunctions that occur; the printer jams and the ink runs out, the forms stuttering and fading on the page in remarkably painterly abstract compositions. In this unique triptych, Guyton produces a compelling study of his ‘X’ form and his process, transforming the cross into a single monumental motif that is subjected to a sequence of starkly beautiful variations: ink blurs into automated, shadowy patterns, fragments of line weld themselves to a host ‘X’ form, and crosses collide to form new geometric shapes, their vectors intersecting while their ink bleeds across each other. The work thus exists somewhere between an obscure linguistic or symbolic signification and abstract shape: as the meanings suggested by the ‘X’ begin to decay, their blurry formulation on the linen instead conjures a more intangible sense of mechanical failure and technological degradation.
The process calls into question the role of the artist in a world in which image production is ever more mechanised and automated; his art is the result of his interest in what happens, as he puts it, ‘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). Working in series, his arsenal of template forms – apart from the ‘X’, Guyton often uses a large ‘U’ shape, flames, and sets of straight lines, as well as pure black fields of ink – reproduce themselves across his oeuvre, eerie automations generated by some kind of technology given a life of its own. In this work however, Guyton stages this process within the bounds of one work, documenting the self-generating logic of his process with a simple, monolithic grandeur, as its central crosses mutate from panel to panel.
In this sense, Guyton creates a world in which technology carries out the artist’s process according to its own internal rules, technical breakdown imagined as an uncanny simulation of unconscious human error and experiment. And indeed, despite the apparent erasure of the painter’s hand, there is a fleeting sense of humanity in his works’ subtle references to older artistic traditions, both in its Warholian methodology, and in its slightly twisted recollection of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist styles of abstraction. Negotiating between man and machine, Untitled is a stark, impressive reflection of contemporary reality.