Untitled

In a way, the printer is in more control than I am.
—Wade Guyton

At once visually searing and poetically stern, Wade Guyon’s Untitled exemplifies the reckoning of the epic conflict between artist, canvas and medium. This audacious and powerfully seductive work from 2006 characterizes Guyton’s long-term investigation into the 21st century’s dissemination of visual culture. Through the use of ordinary digital tools, such as a computer, scanner and printer, Guyton stretches the possibilities of the canvas while pushing the boundary of painting. The result is a revelatory composition that relishes in the stunning accidental marks caused by the transmission of motifs from his computer screen through his inkjet printer.
Soaring above a scathing sea of flames, Guyton’s signature stark white U dominates the composition, slightly off center. The roaring fire is seemingly on its way towards full destruction as the tallest flames start to extend into the center register. On his most recognizable icon, Guyton admits, “Fire is always captivating. I thought of it as romantic, but camp. 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 Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012, p. 204). By limiting his color palette to black, white and orange, he achieves an arresting, minimalist harmony between various universal symbols and randomized marks.
By relying on the inkjet printer, Guyton celebrates the beauty of imperfection while exploring our relationship to machines. In Untitled, a distinct interplay between creativity and process is seen in the horizontal white skid lines that accentuate the center of the canvas. The artist is admittedly process-focused, saying “in a way, the printer is in more control than I am” (W. Guyton, quoted in “Wade Guyton Talks About Process Over Creativity”, Mutual Art, May 2014). First, he crafts his imagery in Microsoft Word where he experiments with various hues, juxtaposing the large, curving typeface in positions on his computer screen with JPEG images of flames scanned from a book. The actual book bears no real significance to the artist, but rather the source imagery he chooses is a commentary on the consumption and appropriation of random snippets of visual culture. Once he is pleased with the configuration of his motifs, he uses them almost like a readymade object that he then prints directly onto the primed and folded canvas.
Not only do Guyton’s flaming U paintings demonstrate the artist’s interest in chance and the machine, but they also serve as unabashed visual accounts of the tactile and confident method of their own making. After careful and precise manipulation of image and text, the artist leaves the finale of his process up to chance. Using the largest Epson Stylus Pro 11880 inkjet printer, he maneuvers the hefty linen of the canvas through the machine. The fold vertically traverses the center of the composition, all the while, revealing Guyton’s process, drawing the viewer’s attention to the gestural turning and re-feeding of the canvas through the printer in order for the image to span the whole length of the canvas. Along the way, wet ink interplays with the printer and the canvas in different ways each time, creating beautiful scars on an ethereal, abstracted and inimitable plane.
An avid reader, Guyton came of age in the 1980s. His abstract references to book covers and printed materials draw a clear line to the Pictures Generation who championed the art of appropriation, while his efficient color palette and stark compositions connect him to Modernists like Frank Stella and to the Minimalist forefathers. When the artist first moved to New York in the late 1990s, he worked under the sculptor Robert Morris, and for seven years, he worked as a guard at the DIA Art Foundation, surrounding himself with art by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Dan Graham. His dedication to evolving methods of reproduction also positions him in a broad lineage of art history – Andy Warhol too explored alternative techniques of reproduction that removed the artist’s hand almost entirely from the canvas. Chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Ann Temkin, emphasizes this point by stating, “You tap a keyboard with one finger and this very large painting emerges. It’s gone against everything we think of as a painting. Pollock flung it; Rauschenberg silkscreened it; Richter took a squeegee; Polke used chemicals. Wade is working in what by now is a pretty venerable tradition, against the conventional idea of painting” (A. Temkin, "Painting, Rebooted," The New York Times, 27 September 2012). Untitled (2006) crystalizes Guyton’s trailblazing and valiant efforts to advance the tradition of painting.