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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection since its creation in 2006, Untitled is a dazzling large-scale example of Wade Guyton’s iconic ‘X’ paintings. Included in the artist’s 2019 retrospective at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, as well as a group show at the Fridericianum, Kassel three years earlier, it captures the thrilling dialogue between man and machine that lies at the heart of his practice. Towering two metres in height, the work stems from Guyton’s series of ‘printer paintings’, begun the previous year. Created by feeding canvas through an industrial Epson inkjet printer, these extraordinary creations pose vital questions about the relationship between paint and technology in the twenty-first century. Here, the ubiquitous letter X—typed in Microsoft Word in Blair ITC Medium—is repeated in stuttering rows: its iconographic form is overlapped, blurred and dragged to the point of illegibility, creating hypnotic patterns and textures. Taking its place within a legacy that extends from Andy Warhol’s silkscreens to Gerhard Richter’s squeegeed abstracts and beyond, it is a vivid thesis on the role of chance in image-making, and a bold chapter in the evolution of painting.
Guyton’s printer paintings evolved from his series of smaller-scale printer ‘drawings’ that he began in 2002. Johanna Burton has described the inception of the project, which began with the artist hand-drawing a large X over a page he ripped from a magazine. ‘He used a ruler, and the lines were more or less straight, but not really, and the unevenness of the ink made the X look more handmade, less dispassionate, than he’d wanted it to’, she explains. ‘… Ripping another page from his stack of magazines and books, he fed it through his home printer (this one little and cheap: an Epson, but no Ultra) after plugging in a ridiculously high point size and typing one giant letter into an otherwise blank Word document: X’ (J. Burton, ‘Rites of Silence: The Art of Wade Guyton’, Artforum, Summer 2008). As he expanded his practice to canvas, Guyton would feed vast sheets of linen through the unwilling jaws of the printer, pulling and manipulating the material in a bid to incite glitches and imperfections. In the present work, the central seam serves as evidence of the fabric having been folded in order to fit it through the machine, while the upper right hand corner bears the scars of his manual disruptions.
Guyton would deploy a variety of images in his printer paintings: from his celebrated flame motif, found on a book cover, to large-scale ‘U’s and photographs of his own studio floor. In the ‘X’, however, he found a symbol perfectly suited to the initial stages of his enquiries. It was at once abstract and laden with meaning: a simple conflation of lines, yet also a signifier for negation. Here it confronts the viewer like a line of code, or a never-ending equation—a stand-in for missing information that may or may not materialise. In this respect, Guyton extends the lines of inquiry set in motion by Minimalism, stripping his art of all external references and allowing it to assert its own objecthood. At the same time, however, the present work invokes a wider history of image-making: from Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, which similarly staged encounters between order and anarchy, to the witty subversions of print reproduction methods employed by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke. Here, art’s age-old materials—linen and pigment—are reborn in their interaction with the machinery of the digital era. The shuddering Xs, still legible amid the chaos, declare a new ground zero.
Guyton’s printer paintings evolved from his series of smaller-scale printer ‘drawings’ that he began in 2002. Johanna Burton has described the inception of the project, which began with the artist hand-drawing a large X over a page he ripped from a magazine. ‘He used a ruler, and the lines were more or less straight, but not really, and the unevenness of the ink made the X look more handmade, less dispassionate, than he’d wanted it to’, she explains. ‘… Ripping another page from his stack of magazines and books, he fed it through his home printer (this one little and cheap: an Epson, but no Ultra) after plugging in a ridiculously high point size and typing one giant letter into an otherwise blank Word document: X’ (J. Burton, ‘Rites of Silence: The Art of Wade Guyton’, Artforum, Summer 2008). As he expanded his practice to canvas, Guyton would feed vast sheets of linen through the unwilling jaws of the printer, pulling and manipulating the material in a bid to incite glitches and imperfections. In the present work, the central seam serves as evidence of the fabric having been folded in order to fit it through the machine, while the upper right hand corner bears the scars of his manual disruptions.
Guyton would deploy a variety of images in his printer paintings: from his celebrated flame motif, found on a book cover, to large-scale ‘U’s and photographs of his own studio floor. In the ‘X’, however, he found a symbol perfectly suited to the initial stages of his enquiries. It was at once abstract and laden with meaning: a simple conflation of lines, yet also a signifier for negation. Here it confronts the viewer like a line of code, or a never-ending equation—a stand-in for missing information that may or may not materialise. In this respect, Guyton extends the lines of inquiry set in motion by Minimalism, stripping his art of all external references and allowing it to assert its own objecthood. At the same time, however, the present work invokes a wider history of image-making: from Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, which similarly staged encounters between order and anarchy, to the witty subversions of print reproduction methods employed by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke. Here, art’s age-old materials—linen and pigment—are reborn in their interaction with the machinery of the digital era. The shuddering Xs, still legible amid the chaos, declare a new ground zero.