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Lot Essay
Executed in 2015, Untitled is a dazzling example of Wade Guyton’s ‘printer’ paintings. Made by dragging primed linen through an industrial inkjet printer, these extraordinary creations stage complex conversations between painting and technology. The present work reproduces a photograph of one of Guyton’s own so-called ‘black paintings’, taken at his exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris the previous year. The show itself was a reprisal of sorts, recapitulating an earlier exhibition at the gallery in which the artist had presented his black paintings in Paris for the first time. Guyton’s practice is one of perpetual recycling and self-reflexivity, not only returning to specific motifs, ideas and processes but also seizing the production and display of his art as a subject in its own right. In the present work, these conceptual layers sit at odds with the visceral immediacy of the painting’s surface, riddled with the scars of its own making.
Guyton first began his printer paintings in 2005. Among his early subjects were graphic elements borrowed from book covers—including his celebrated fire motif—as well as typographical symbols such as Xs and Us. His black paintings, like so much of his oeuvre, arose by chance. Struggling to achieve a crisp line on his X paintings, he drew a solid black square in Photoshop and printed it over his failed attempts. Reinventing the black monochrome—the ultimate Modernist tabula rasa—the results foregrounded the complex painterly effects achieved by the printer: from the uneven saturation of ink, to the traces of the wheels on the wet surface. Between 2007 and 2008 Guyton unveiled these new works in a series of three exhibitions in galleries in New York, Paris and Frankfurt. The 2014 exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel reprised this earlier presentation: Guyton produced ten new black paintings for the show using the same digital file, but with a more advanced Epson printer model, an updated Mac OS X operating system and new UltraChrome ink.
Common to both shows, too, was the installation of a black-painted floor within the gallery space. It was designed to mimic the floor of Guyton’s own studio, over which he would habitually drag his paintings as they dropped from the printer, and would subsequently leave them to collect layers of marks and debris. The artist has frequently incorporated references to his studio setup into his work, documenting his methods at the same time as enacting them. This complex feedback loop is at play in the present work, whose subject is reflected in the floor below like a glossy mirror image. Guyton typically folds his canvases in half to fit through the printer, relishing the inconsistencies and mismatched patterns that occur as he prints both sides separately. Here, this technique is applied not only to the original canvas on the wall but also to its photographic reproduction, splicing the painting anew. Just like his canvases, fed multiple times through the jaws of the machine, the artist reflects and refracts his practice through its own systems. The image becomes a self-generating entity, invested with new potential at each stage of reinvention.
Guyton first began his printer paintings in 2005. Among his early subjects were graphic elements borrowed from book covers—including his celebrated fire motif—as well as typographical symbols such as Xs and Us. His black paintings, like so much of his oeuvre, arose by chance. Struggling to achieve a crisp line on his X paintings, he drew a solid black square in Photoshop and printed it over his failed attempts. Reinventing the black monochrome—the ultimate Modernist tabula rasa—the results foregrounded the complex painterly effects achieved by the printer: from the uneven saturation of ink, to the traces of the wheels on the wet surface. Between 2007 and 2008 Guyton unveiled these new works in a series of three exhibitions in galleries in New York, Paris and Frankfurt. The 2014 exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel reprised this earlier presentation: Guyton produced ten new black paintings for the show using the same digital file, but with a more advanced Epson printer model, an updated Mac OS X operating system and new UltraChrome ink.
Common to both shows, too, was the installation of a black-painted floor within the gallery space. It was designed to mimic the floor of Guyton’s own studio, over which he would habitually drag his paintings as they dropped from the printer, and would subsequently leave them to collect layers of marks and debris. The artist has frequently incorporated references to his studio setup into his work, documenting his methods at the same time as enacting them. This complex feedback loop is at play in the present work, whose subject is reflected in the floor below like a glossy mirror image. Guyton typically folds his canvases in half to fit through the printer, relishing the inconsistencies and mismatched patterns that occur as he prints both sides separately. Here, this technique is applied not only to the original canvas on the wall but also to its photographic reproduction, splicing the painting anew. Just like his canvases, fed multiple times through the jaws of the machine, the artist reflects and refracts his practice through its own systems. The image becomes a self-generating entity, invested with new potential at each stage of reinvention.