Beschreibung:

Wade Guyton Untitled 2006 Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen 80 x 69 in. (203.2 x 175.3 cm.)
Provenance Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne Private Collection Exhibited London, westlondonprojects, Wade Guyton Paintings, October 6 - November 11, 2006 Catalogue Essay “I’m not hoping for an accident or even courting disaster. The works on linen are a record of their own making…” WADE GUYTON 2012 Reinterpreting the tropes of minimalism and the monochrome palette, Wade Guyton’s mechanized linen canvases epitomize our technologically disrupted times. Realizing his large-scale graphic compositions through the means of a large-scale Epson inkjet printer, Guyton distances himself from the artistic process, rendering the machine the artist’s instrument. Entwining symbolism, language and technological automation, Guyton’s Untitled imagery cleverly elaborates upon the modernist canon, inspiring in the contemporary sphere an important dialogue regarding the role of the artist and the movement towards mechanization. Initially interested in the role of the found object and the transposition of three-dimensional life into a two-dimensional representation, Guyton’s earliest works capture his “…growing involvement with the dialogic rapport between sculpture and photography, the reciprocities and gaps between how spaces and objects are recorded in two dimensions and experienced in three.” (S. Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 13) From this fundamental understanding of the mutability of the artistic process and the conversant nature of seemingly disparate artistic methodologies, Guyton developed a profound understanding of the object not as subject but as medium; the conceptual and practical elements of the artistic process could combine in a manufactured yet theoretically challenging composition. As the artist notes, “When I started to be interested in making art, all the artists I was interested in were involved with the manipulation of language or the malleability of the categories of art. There was a freedom in this way of thinking. There was a space where objects could be speculative.” (Wade Guyton quoted in S. Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 11) In Untitled, 2006, Guyton transcribes one of his earliest motifs - initially explored in his drawings on the appropriated pages of books and magazines - in a jarringly geometric yet irregular pattern that references the fallibility of technology. Slightly blurred and visually arresting, Guyton’s Xs beg to be read. One of the most common symbols in the Roman alphabet, the X is reframed by Guyton as a conceptual provocation; challenging both the viewer and technology, Guyton captures the imperfection in the mechanization of printing, much in the manner of Pop master Andy Warhol’s imperfect silkscreen process. In fact, Guyton describes his production of these works as a simple, unsystematic experiment: “I'm also just making dumb marks that don't require the complexity of the photo printer technology - and it's interesting how the printer can't handle such simple gestures." (W. Guyton, quoted in D. Fogle, W. Guyton, J. Rasmussen, K. Walker (eds.), 'A Conversation about Yves Klein Mid-Century Design Nostalgia Branding, and Flatbed scanning,' Guyton/Walker: The Failever of Judgement, exh. cat., Midway Museum of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, 2004, pp. 45) It is, in fact, the very imprecision of the printer’s marks upon the canvas that best embodies Guyton’s aesthetic; the shifted, incomplete rows of Xs, the striations and variations in the printer ink’s density and clarity, comingle in a bold declaration of Guyton’s theory on the pictorial landscape. Speaking of Guyton’s inexact symbols, Scott Rothkopf elaborates, “The Xs and bars fell randomly atop the paper, since Guyton couldn’t really control the printer or even imagine exactly where his marks might wind up, especially when he choked the machine by stuffing it with multiple pages at once. This disjunction was particularly evident whe