Untitled

A sheet of linen intersected by delicate striations of jet-black pigment, Wade Guyton's Untitled (2008) challenges the pre-conceived notions of abstraction by re-approaching the formal structures of Modernist painting through contemporary technology. Its horizontal bands creating a hypnotic effect, the work encourages the eye to skip down the entire vertiginous length of the composition. Perpetually blurring the line between the artist's intent and technological will, Guyton's monochromatic paintings document the process of their own creation, stressing the innate fallibility of machinery. Created by physically pulling the vast swathe of linen fabric through an ink-jet printer, Untitled captures both the unrelenting automatism of technology and its capacity for uniqueness through random variation, mutation and error. The gradual unloading of ink by the printer's carriage creates a variegated effect, appearing to capture a moment of stasis. In its documentation of the skips, skids, stutters and smears that inadvertently occur during the printing process, Guyton's inkjet medium paradoxically betrays a sense of individuality in the face of mechanisation. With its deep black horizontal bands creating a hypnotic effect, encouraging the eye to skip down the entire length of the composition, there are parallels between the work and earlier Minimalists like Frank Stella, and like Stella, Guyton’s work examines what it means for a work of art to be, above all, an object shaped by technology. As the width of Stella’s house painter’s brush determined the stripes painted onto his canvas, so Guyton’s printer defines the nature of his art object, reminding us of both the physicality of the object and drawing attention to the way in which man and machine have always collaborated.