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Lot Essay
‘I make paintings, but I don’t think of myself as a painter’ (Wade Guyton)
Straddling the borders between painting and printmaking, originality and reproduction, Untitled is a vivid example of Wade Guyton’s distinctive practice. Created in 2017, and acquired by the present owner that year, it was made for the artist’s major survey exhibition Wade Guyton, Siamo arrivati at Madre: museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples. Presenting two vertical fields of vivid blue, the work’s support is a large-scale linen sheet, like those primed to serve as canvases for oil painting, that Guyton has printed on using an Epson UltraChrome HDX inkjet printer. Its diptych form is the result of his having to fold the canvas in half to feed it through the machine. The doubled image is a photograph of a large blank swathe of blue carpet laid over a table, lifted at its upper edge. The fabric itself featured in an installation at the start of the exhibition, offering an insight into Guyton’s studio process.
Viewed close-up, the work’s printed surface reveals visible striations. These become increasingly prominent on the right side, eventually turning pink in the lower reaches: an artefact of the printing process, as the store of blue ink diminishes. Pigment bleeds at the seam down the centre. There are also visible creases on the linen, the result of the printer’s mechanical handling. As Guyton explains: ‘Anything that happens to the work in the process in making it become part of the work. The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out; the canvases pile up on the floor’ (W. Guyton quoted in D. De Salvo, ‘Interview’, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2012, p. 208).
Guyton’s highly idiosyncratic practice is both contemporary and nostalgic, an homage to the era of the inkjet printer. It commenced in the 2000s, after he printed a Microsoft Word ‘X’ over sheets torn from magazines. More recently his practice has expanded to include monochrome colour fields, alluding to Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist painting while denying the primacy of the artist’s hand. Electric in colour and rich in self-referential complexity, the present work deepens Guyton’s investigation into the intersection of art and technology.
Straddling the borders between painting and printmaking, originality and reproduction, Untitled is a vivid example of Wade Guyton’s distinctive practice. Created in 2017, and acquired by the present owner that year, it was made for the artist’s major survey exhibition Wade Guyton, Siamo arrivati at Madre: museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples. Presenting two vertical fields of vivid blue, the work’s support is a large-scale linen sheet, like those primed to serve as canvases for oil painting, that Guyton has printed on using an Epson UltraChrome HDX inkjet printer. Its diptych form is the result of his having to fold the canvas in half to feed it through the machine. The doubled image is a photograph of a large blank swathe of blue carpet laid over a table, lifted at its upper edge. The fabric itself featured in an installation at the start of the exhibition, offering an insight into Guyton’s studio process.
Viewed close-up, the work’s printed surface reveals visible striations. These become increasingly prominent on the right side, eventually turning pink in the lower reaches: an artefact of the printing process, as the store of blue ink diminishes. Pigment bleeds at the seam down the centre. There are also visible creases on the linen, the result of the printer’s mechanical handling. As Guyton explains: ‘Anything that happens to the work in the process in making it become part of the work. The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out; the canvases pile up on the floor’ (W. Guyton quoted in D. De Salvo, ‘Interview’, in Wade Guyton OS, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2012, p. 208).
Guyton’s highly idiosyncratic practice is both contemporary and nostalgic, an homage to the era of the inkjet printer. It commenced in the 2000s, after he printed a Microsoft Word ‘X’ over sheets torn from magazines. More recently his practice has expanded to include monochrome colour fields, alluding to Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist painting while denying the primacy of the artist’s hand. Electric in colour and rich in self-referential complexity, the present work deepens Guyton’s investigation into the intersection of art and technology.