Wade Guyton - New Now New York Tuesday, March 12, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Imprinted with Wade Guyton's distinctive X mark, Untitled (2007) appears modernist in its evocation of the “favored forms” of formal abstraction. A simple, bilaterally symmetric shape, Guyton’s ubiquitous X’s recall the visual language of 1960s' geometric abstraction.I Characteristic of modernist paintings, the picture plane of Untitled is flattened; the patterned rows of X’s imply no spatial illusionism. Yet, Guyton “painted” Untitled using a large commercial printer – which he manipulated to create “errors.” The irregular smears of ink in Untitled are a testament to the artist’s novel process, complicating any simplistic direct artistic lineage. As Guyton’s improvisation disrupts the machine, the complicated convergence of man and computer creates marks, which though printed, are expressive in their singularity. 

     

    In the postwar period, as artists sought ways to tap into the unconscious mind and relinquish compositional control, the presence of the artist’s hand became complicated. This led to innovations of the artistic process, including Surrealist automatic drawing and Kinetic action painting. Guyton continues the legacy of minimizing the hand’s presence by employing a printer, yet it is his physical interventions which create the unique variations that animate Guyton's work. Though the printer is programmed to create perfect images, the artist is not interested in perfection. He captures instead the natural world's entropy: its characteristic tendency towards disorder.

    “I’m not hoping for an accident or even courting disaster. The works on linen are a record of their own making.” 
    —Wade Guyton
    In Untitled, the surface effects of printing errors appear in the irregular rows of X’s. Sixty-six X’s mark the linen canvas in lines which lack perfect horizontality. Some X’s appear rigid in their grid-like placement and others appear defiant of this order. Stark black with rigid borders, the X’s have smeared tails that suggest upward descent as though continuing outside of the picture plane. As the scale of the image is too large for the linen, several X’s appear cut off on the sides. To the same effect, the top and bottom of the canvas are empty space: the whiteness of these margins is “compositionally active negative space [rather] than inert blank space, evoking the potentially boundless area that images and words inhabit beyond a computer window's scroll bars."II 

     

    In 2002, Guyton began exploring the X motif in his work, hand drawing X’s over found printed material. Later that year, he came to the Warholesque epiphany that “The small Epson printer sitting on my desk could make these same marks much more efficiently.”III He began typing the letter X in random strings and printing the output file over printed matter, leading to critical readings of his work claiming Guyton was attempting to cancel modernism. He reasserted “It wasn't really about a cancellation. It was about trying to figure out how to make a mark or how to make a drawing or how to do anything when you were overwhelmed by the history of art."IV By obliquely, rather than explicitly, referencing the modernist canon, Guyton harnesses the formal language of these works but imbues their legacy with a contemporary technological edge.

     

    Guyton combines mechanical reproduction and manual production, exploring the nature of humanity through the machine. The artist's work begs the question: how can one humanize mechanical production? Guyton seems to conclude, through his work, that the very nature of human beings is to err. The “mistakes” generated by his process insist that within the physical realm, randomness, chance, and permutation are categorical imperatives of existence. Holding down the X key randomly to generate the jpeg file alongside orchestrating “accidents” grant his work a haphazard quality characteristic of lived reality more sublime than the perfection of the virtual world.

     

     Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, New York, 2012, p. 19.

    II Ibid, p. 20.

    III Wade Guyton quoted in Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, New York, 2012, p. 16.

    IV  Ibid, p. 19.

    • Provenance

      Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

50

Untitled

Epson Ultra Chrome on linen
43 x 36 in. (109.2 x 91.4 cm)
Executed in 2006.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $114,300

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com
 

New Now

New York Auction 12 March 2024