Wade Guyton

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2014

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Wade Guyton has transformed the modern-day perception of art. A revolution likened to Jackson Pollock’s dripping technique and Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, Guyton narrows the gap between art and technology to a bare minimum and, as a result, has expanded our understanding of painting on canvas. Making use of impersonal technologies, the artist successfully replaced the palette for his computer and the paintbrush for his Epson Stylus Pro 11880 printer. Untitled invariably portrays Guyton’s enquiry on the boundaries of painting and the nature of visual communication in general.

Making full use of technology for his paintings, Guyton investigates the limits of his digital devices. Describing the outcome of this process, Guyton has stated, “there is evidence of this struggle in the work, in its surface. I've been putting different kinds of material through my inkjet printer and there are lots of fuck ups in the printing, the inkjet heads get snagged, ink drips, the registration slides. I'm also just making dumb marks – lines, Xs, Us, squares, monochromatic shapes that don't require the complexity of the photo printer technology – and it's interesting how the printer can't handle such simple gestures” (Wade Guyton cited in: Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Midway Contemporary Art, Guyton\Walker: The Failever of Judgement, 2005, p. 49). The Epson Stylus Pro 11880 inkjet printers he uses are not built to deal with the thickness of  canvas nor is the ink used meant for printing on it. The purposeful misuse of his tools, pushing them to the extreme of their technical capacity, allows for an element of chance that cannot be controlled, as the printer and ink struggle to respond to the canvas.

Untitled is a prime example of this unique process. A portrayal of Guyton’s iconic use of a particular quotidian shape, Untitled depicts a basic formation of four circles, a template which defined Guyton’s oeuvre between 2005 and 2006. Despite its simplicity, the present work is charged with meaning. At its surface, one can see the unlikely results of using mechanical tools for artistic ends. Dragged through the unwieldy printer, in Untitled unpredictable dribbles of ink and darkened blurs belie their mechanical modes of production, invoking the expressive drips and dabs of a painter and his brush. Although chance is characteristic of Wade Guyton’s work, it is never a deciding factor. Most significant is the artist’s attempt to regain control over 'accidents' created by the technology in hand. Untitled is the product of mechanical reproduction, reflecting an approach Guyton described as an interest 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 and changes it” (Wade Guyton cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Wade Guyton OS, 2005, p. 23). The alternation between unbridled chaos and mechanised control allows Guyton to become the master of his creations, rendering Untitled inexplicably alluring at plain sight yet radically engaged with the history of art at its core. Untitled beautifully expresses the delicate juxtaposition between precision and accident, which in turn defines Guyton’s art.

Wade Guyton’s significant contribution to the history of art effectively extends a grand tradition of conceptual reassessment regarding themes, authorship and appropriation that were variously investigated by key Twentieth Century artists including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and John Baldessari. As Ann Temkin has described, “it’s gone against everything we think of as painting… there are so many historical landmarks that precede him, so many artists who took the traditional notion of painting in a new direction” (Ann Temkin, ‘Painting, Rebooted’, The New York Times, 27 September 2012, online). His works are now held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American art (where his first critically-acclaimed 2012-13 retrospective took place) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.