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Lot Essay
‘The artworks work against the machine. There is evidence of this struggle in the work, in its surface’ (Wade Guyton)
Spanning more than two metres in height, Untitled (2015) is a mesmerising example of Wade Guyton’s monochrome inkjet paintings. Made by wrestling primed canvas through an industrial Epson printer, these extraordinary creations stage thrilling conversations between man and machine. The present work confronts the viewer as a towering silvery monochrome: the ultimate Modernist archetype. Its surface, however, is riddled with schisms, scrapes and scratches, each mark an abrasion from the jaws of its reluctant opponent. A vertical seam down the centre, evocative of Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, marks the point at which the material was folded in order to fit through the printer. Riddled with the scars of chance and error, the work tests the limits of both painting and technology, asking at what point one might be forced to concede to the other in the digital age.
Guyton came to prominence in the early 2000s with his series of printer ‘drawings’. These works were created by printing out motifs onto pages ripped from books and magazines. Fascinated by the range of unpredictable effects achieved by an everyday piece of hardware, in 2005 Guyton began to experiment with the idea of printer ‘paintings’. Feeding vast sheets of linen through a machine not designed to accommodate it, he relished the glitches and imperfections that arose: the uneven distribution of ink, the traces of wheels on the wet surface and the movement of the print heads. Guyton would purposefully pull and tug at the material in order to create further layers of disruption, forcing the printer to expand its repertoire of marks. ‘The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out … Whatever happens when I’m making them is part of the work’, he explains (W. Guyton, quoted in interview with D. De Salvo, Wade Guyton: OS, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2012, p. 208).
Following on from his initial ‘fire’ and ‘X’ paintings, which used a mixture of scanned images and letters typed in Microsoft Word, Guyton created his monochrome works by drawing rectangles of colour in Photoshop. As the ink bled and stuttered its way onto canvas, the lofty ideals once held by Kazimir Malevich, Robert Ryman and others took a similar battering. If monochrome painting had once been upheld as the ‘ground zero’ of Modernism, here it began to crumble before a new order, its fate determined by processes beyond its control. In this regard, works such as the present takes their place within a rich lineage of artistic practices that sought to dismantle painting from the inside out: from Andy Warhol’s silkscreens and Gerhard Richter’s squeegeed abstracts, to the works of Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen and Rudolf Stingel. The printer, too, is dented by its encounter with paint, its capabilities pushed beyond recognition. In the tussle between the two, new frontiers emerge, offering fresh possibilities for image-making in the twenty-first century.
Spanning more than two metres in height, Untitled (2015) is a mesmerising example of Wade Guyton’s monochrome inkjet paintings. Made by wrestling primed canvas through an industrial Epson printer, these extraordinary creations stage thrilling conversations between man and machine. The present work confronts the viewer as a towering silvery monochrome: the ultimate Modernist archetype. Its surface, however, is riddled with schisms, scrapes and scratches, each mark an abrasion from the jaws of its reluctant opponent. A vertical seam down the centre, evocative of Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, marks the point at which the material was folded in order to fit through the printer. Riddled with the scars of chance and error, the work tests the limits of both painting and technology, asking at what point one might be forced to concede to the other in the digital age.
Guyton came to prominence in the early 2000s with his series of printer ‘drawings’. These works were created by printing out motifs onto pages ripped from books and magazines. Fascinated by the range of unpredictable effects achieved by an everyday piece of hardware, in 2005 Guyton began to experiment with the idea of printer ‘paintings’. Feeding vast sheets of linen through a machine not designed to accommodate it, he relished the glitches and imperfections that arose: the uneven distribution of ink, the traces of wheels on the wet surface and the movement of the print heads. Guyton would purposefully pull and tug at the material in order to create further layers of disruption, forcing the printer to expand its repertoire of marks. ‘The drips; the accidents; the ink runs out … Whatever happens when I’m making them is part of the work’, he explains (W. Guyton, quoted in interview with D. De Salvo, Wade Guyton: OS, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2012, p. 208).
Following on from his initial ‘fire’ and ‘X’ paintings, which used a mixture of scanned images and letters typed in Microsoft Word, Guyton created his monochrome works by drawing rectangles of colour in Photoshop. As the ink bled and stuttered its way onto canvas, the lofty ideals once held by Kazimir Malevich, Robert Ryman and others took a similar battering. If monochrome painting had once been upheld as the ‘ground zero’ of Modernism, here it began to crumble before a new order, its fate determined by processes beyond its control. In this regard, works such as the present takes their place within a rich lineage of artistic practices that sought to dismantle painting from the inside out: from Andy Warhol’s silkscreens and Gerhard Richter’s squeegeed abstracts, to the works of Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen and Rudolf Stingel. The printer, too, is dented by its encounter with paint, its capabilities pushed beyond recognition. In the tussle between the two, new frontiers emerge, offering fresh possibilities for image-making in the twenty-first century.