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拍品专文
'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. ' (Guyton, quoted in S. Rothkopf, "Modern Pictures", in Colour, Power & Style, exh. cat., Kunstverein, Hamburg, 2006)
In Untitled 2006 Wade Guyton created mechanical rows and clusters of black X's scattered across the white canvas. The canvas seems divided into two sides by a thin line which is exempt of paint. Both halves are disjointedly united in a slightly distorted way, whereas the left side appears comparatively clean, the right side embraces drips, track marks of the printer wheels and slight discoloration. On closer inspection the entire work and many individual X's are slightly askew, interrupted, overlapping, disconnected or interspersed. Classified 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. 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.
Untitled 2006 is part of a series of work, which he conceived for his first solo exhibition in New York. Reacting directly to the exhibition space Guyton substantially increased the size of his works, which was only possible by overcoming the determined maximum printer width. He folded and taped the double-width canvas in order to print half of the image on one side, then flipping the canvas over and printing on the other side. This process led to the signature gap running vertically through his X paintings and later series executed in a similar manner. At times forcing or dragging, always manipulating the printer to stain the linen initially according to his digital file, but simultaneously provoking accidents to distort the elegant simplicity of the image. As Scott Rothkopf observes: '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' (ibid.).
The X is a recurring motive in Guyton's work, appearing as a marking of a window on a photograph, a sculptural intervention in urban space and lastly on canvas. By placing the black X on the white canvas Guyton uses an image between abstraction and function. But the X remains a signifier without meaning, 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", exh. cat., Formalism, Modern Art, Today, Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2004 p. 59).
Guyton's work is deeply rooted in art history, visually in the tradition of Modernists such as Malevich, he is especially indebted to postmodernist artists re-inventing appropriation art whilst applying the formal repertoire of minimal and conceptual art. Literally applying Frank Stella's dictum of 'keeping the paint as good as it was in the can' Guyton never touches paint or a brush but rather uses an army of inkjet printer heads to disperse the colour on his sheet. Thereby bringing Warhol work process into the 21st century, rather than having an assembly-line factory full of workers and collaborators the production process is reduced fittingly to postmodernist office environment with minimal human involvement.
Guyton has had several international exhibitions, most recently a solo exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2010, and his work is represented in important public collections, such as the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and one painting from this series in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In Untitled 2006 Wade Guyton created mechanical rows and clusters of black X's scattered across the white canvas. The canvas seems divided into two sides by a thin line which is exempt of paint. Both halves are disjointedly united in a slightly distorted way, whereas the left side appears comparatively clean, the right side embraces drips, track marks of the printer wheels and slight discoloration. On closer inspection the entire work and many individual X's are slightly askew, interrupted, overlapping, disconnected or interspersed. Classified 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. 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.
Untitled 2006 is part of a series of work, which he conceived for his first solo exhibition in New York. Reacting directly to the exhibition space Guyton substantially increased the size of his works, which was only possible by overcoming the determined maximum printer width. He folded and taped the double-width canvas in order to print half of the image on one side, then flipping the canvas over and printing on the other side. This process led to the signature gap running vertically through his X paintings and later series executed in a similar manner. At times forcing or dragging, always manipulating the printer to stain the linen initially according to his digital file, but simultaneously provoking accidents to distort the elegant simplicity of the image. As Scott Rothkopf observes: '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' (ibid.).
The X is a recurring motive in Guyton's work, appearing as a marking of a window on a photograph, a sculptural intervention in urban space and lastly on canvas. By placing the black X on the white canvas Guyton uses an image between abstraction and function. But the X remains a signifier without meaning, 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", exh. cat., Formalism, Modern Art, Today, Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2004 p. 59).
Guyton's work is deeply rooted in art history, visually in the tradition of Modernists such as Malevich, he is especially indebted to postmodernist artists re-inventing appropriation art whilst applying the formal repertoire of minimal and conceptual art. Literally applying Frank Stella's dictum of 'keeping the paint as good as it was in the can' Guyton never touches paint or a brush but rather uses an army of inkjet printer heads to disperse the colour on his sheet. Thereby bringing Warhol work process into the 21st century, rather than having an assembly-line factory full of workers and collaborators the production process is reduced fittingly to postmodernist office environment with minimal human involvement.
Guyton has had several international exhibitions, most recently a solo exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2010, and his work is represented in important public collections, such as the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and one painting from this series in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.