Wade Guyton

Modern Collections, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2012

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling to the sides and corner edges of the canvas, however it is only noticeable under close inspection. There is a faint impression along the bottom edge, which is approximately 1 inch long, located approximately 10 inches from the left edge and 1 ½ inches from the bottom edge. Unframed.
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“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.” Wade Guyton, 2005

 

Wade Guyton has revolutionized the realm of contemporary painting. Executed in 2007, the present lot is a seminal example of Wade Guyton’s iconic digital paintings made from scanners and digital inkjet technology. Throughout his oeuvre, Guyton opens up painting to chance by running the canvas through a printer whose struggles with the thickness of the canvas create random ‘failures’ and asymmetry in the application of paint. The use of chance is typical of Wade Guyton’s work, as is his attempt to gain control over such accidents. In conjunction with the use of accidents, Guyton reasserts his control through his own manipulations of the canvas as it reluctantly squeezes through the printer.

The push and pull between mechanized control and unbridled chaos is what makes this painting so alluring, so radical, and yet so engaged with the history of art. There is a mechanization of the act of painting process through his use of an industrial sized printer to create ‘imagery’ originating from a file on his computer. This pushes the possibility of what a painting can be and how it can be made to the logical extreme that artists such as Pollock and subsequently Richter instigated in their own redefinitions of painting. As Ann Tempkin writes, “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” (Ann Temkin cited in "Painting, Rebooted," The New York Times, September 27, 2012). This concern with seriality and mechanical reproduction may trace back through decades of advancement in modernism and minimalism, but Guyton’s pictures retain a wholly unique and unadulterated visual pleasure that renders them thrilling to look at.

The present work is at once optically searing and poetically austere, characterizing Guyton’s theoretically incisive examination into the transmission of visual culture in the Twenty-first Century. The artist deploys quotidian digital technologies to coax new possibilities from the medium of painting, reveling in the beautiful mishaps that occur as his repertoire of recycled modernist forms are transmitted from the screen through his printer. Such employment of chance and variation is imbued with the hard-edged color field abstraction of modernist painters such as Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, and Daniel Buren, especially in the calculated, geometric forms seen on the present composition.

Guyton first moved to New York from a small town in Tennessee in 1996, and his work is now held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. While studying at Hunter College under the tutelage of the revered minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, the artist worked for seven years as a guard at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea, surrounded by the work of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Dan Graham. Guyton’s importance as both an exceptional student of the art of the past and a father figure for the artists of today was cemented with his critically acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2012.