“I’ve become interested in when something starts as an accident and then becomes a template for other things, or reproduces itself and generates its own logic until something else intervenes to change it.” - Wade Guyton
New York based Wade Guyton is one of today’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists. The present lot illustrates his progression from “printer drawings” to printer paintings. As Guyton explains, “My printer was sitting there, and it just seemed like a more efficient way to make this mark,” and given the dazzling outcome it seems it most certainly was. “Recently I’ve been using Epson inkjet printers and flatbed scanners as tools to make works that act like drawings, paintings, even sculptures. I spend a lot of time with books and so logically I’ve ended up using pages from books as material – pages torn from books and fed through an inkjet printer….The resulting images aren’t exactly what the machines are designed for – slick digital photographs. There is often a struggle between the printer and my material – and the traces of this are left on the surface – snags, drips, streaks, mis-registrations, blurs.” (Wade Guyton from his statement upon receiving the 2004 Visual Arts Grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts) By physically struggling with the printer in order to create the images he desires, Guyton has created his own visually vocabulary. His paintings are executed upon primed linen, the linen is folded and fed through an inkjet printer creating dramatic seams. In Untitled, 2006, the unprimed linen occupies the top half of the composition while vertical green and red bands of color cover the lower half. Guyton explains his artistic decision stating that “Color (is) an empty descriptive and meaningful only if contrasted with black and white.” (Wade Guyton, Color, Power & Style, exh. cat. Petzel Gallery, New York, p. 34)