Wade Guyton

ARTWALK NY Auction benefiting the Coalition for the Homeless, New York, November 3, 2008
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

 

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are some surface irregularities to the canvas, likely due to the artist's working method. There are some ink smudges on the upper left of the 'X' and uneven application of the ink likely due to the artist's choice of medium. Unframed.
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Wade Guyton is one of the most celebrated, young artists of the 21^st century. His most familiar iconography is the letter X inked in black. As a conceptual painter for the new millennia, the artist has challenged our notion of what it means to place pigment onto canvas by removing his paint brush and rendering his works using an inkjet desktop printer.

Guyton’s mature practice evolved out of his process of marking up pages of art books with letters and basic geometric elements. In order to create paintings, the artist replaced paper with canvas and digitally produced colored bars and grids in Microsoft Works. He repeatedly fed unprimed linen through his printer so that chance would lead to the resulting image. Over time, this practice has been refined to produce the imagery that we see in this Untitled work.

The present subject is a nearly pristine X form. The ink is richly saturated and the diagonal intersecting lines form an almost perfectly aligned target. The irregularities in the pigment reveal themselves in various rectangular blocks of pigment, each delicately stacked. The top edges of the form have a slightly larger gap between the ink and the remaining elements, as if shadowing the rest of the form. The X is printed off-center and the form extends beyond the two dimensional plane of the pictorial surface as it wraps around the lower left turning edge. 

Scott Rothkopf has noted, “Guyton’s art has always been characterized by his particular sensitivity to these unexpected failures, as well as by a knowing wariness toward the kind of sophisticated trickiness that might seem to predestine pictorial success – and it is these paired impulses that may have helped generate his subsequent body of work.” (S. Rothkopf, “The New Black”, Parkett 83, p. 77).  Each of the artist’s paintings cannot be executed exactly the way the artist conceived them on his screen. Rather, much of the image results from chance; the amount of ink expelled onto the canvas from the printer may produce either denser or less supple surfaces. In some areas, ink would be richer, in others thinner and less even. Similar to the work of Andy Warhol, the artist’s conception cannot entirely control the resulting image that appears on the support. Rather, the byproduct and image are a consequence of material beyond ones control.

Guyton’s oeuvre evolved out of the creative processes of the appropriation artists of the 1980s. There are similarities to the work of Richard Prince’s Joke paintings where the printed matter on the support is sometimes crisp and readable and at others overly inked and saturated; as well as to Barbara Kruger who used digital processing to produce her work. In all three artists' work  the removal of hand is adroit while still retaining a very personalized, instantly recognizable imagery.