.jpg?w=1)
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’
–Wade Guyton
A hypnotising alliance between the physical and virtual world, Untitled is an early example of Wade Guyton’s seminal printed paintings; a celebrated series prefiguring the artist’s geometric and linguistically graphic silhouettes. Sparking a fascinating dichotomy between human intention and mechanic disturbance, Guyton folds swathes of canvas in half, feeding the material through a printer repetitively, intentionally allowing, even encouraging errors that subsequently become integral to the final product. Composing a tantalising rhythm scoring the length of the canvas, the present work displays a dynamically drifting assembly of perpendicular and polychromatic striations. Framed by a harmonising expanse of exposed linen, Guyton’s bands of colour at once read as a heavily censored document while also alluding to the heraldry of flags and the mass-production of modern machinery.
Untitled thus interrogates modern methods of digital reproduction in an age of technological advancement. Guyton’s preoccupation with machine fabrication began during his studies at Hunter College in New York in the late 1990s. A student of Robert Morris, Guyton became well versed in Minimalist theory and its subsequent criticisms, such as that of Roland Barthes. Further entangled in the primacy of the Modernist canon, Guyton’s practice extends a grand tradition of conceptual reassessment regarding themes of authorship and appropriation that were variously investigated in the preceding decades by artists including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari, and Christopher Wool, all of whom are discernible in the present work. Meanwhile Guyton’s visually arresting deployment of the stripe allies that of Morris Louis, Daniel Buren and Frank Stella. Transcending artistic categories, Untitled is a captivating coalition between the analogue and the digital; a curious questioning of the very conventions of drawing, print-making and painting.
–Wade Guyton
A hypnotising alliance between the physical and virtual world, Untitled is an early example of Wade Guyton’s seminal printed paintings; a celebrated series prefiguring the artist’s geometric and linguistically graphic silhouettes. Sparking a fascinating dichotomy between human intention and mechanic disturbance, Guyton folds swathes of canvas in half, feeding the material through a printer repetitively, intentionally allowing, even encouraging errors that subsequently become integral to the final product. Composing a tantalising rhythm scoring the length of the canvas, the present work displays a dynamically drifting assembly of perpendicular and polychromatic striations. Framed by a harmonising expanse of exposed linen, Guyton’s bands of colour at once read as a heavily censored document while also alluding to the heraldry of flags and the mass-production of modern machinery.
Untitled thus interrogates modern methods of digital reproduction in an age of technological advancement. Guyton’s preoccupation with machine fabrication began during his studies at Hunter College in New York in the late 1990s. A student of Robert Morris, Guyton became well versed in Minimalist theory and its subsequent criticisms, such as that of Roland Barthes. Further entangled in the primacy of the Modernist canon, Guyton’s practice extends a grand tradition of conceptual reassessment regarding themes of authorship and appropriation that were variously investigated in the preceding decades by artists including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari, and Christopher Wool, all of whom are discernible in the present work. Meanwhile Guyton’s visually arresting deployment of the stripe allies that of Morris Louis, Daniel Buren and Frank Stella. Transcending artistic categories, Untitled is a captivating coalition between the analogue and the digital; a curious questioning of the very conventions of drawing, print-making and painting.