Wade Guyton’s Untitled, 2009, possesses the penumbral gray, delicate shading and subtle tonal variation of a charcoal drawing, yet the work is the product of an Epson UltraChrome inkjet printer. Characteristic of Guyton’s artistic lexicon, Untitled combines digital printing and manual intervention as the artist disrupts the calibrated printing process to create mechanical errors. These disruptions imbue the piece with material traces of Guyton’s presence. Untitled was created as part of a series of monochromes initially exhibited at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. This set of monochromes was produced using ink with exactly fifty-percent black saturation, resulting in soft grays and diaphanous inky strata. Scott Rothkopf goes as far to refer to these works as “more delicate and fragile than any in Guyton’s oeuvre.”i
Guyton chose the cloudy shade of gray to mirror the gallery’s floor, creating parallels between his work and the late 1960s modernist interior. The thin ink exposes the texture of the painting ground, emphasizing the linen surface’s rough quality. Guyton switched from canvas to primed linen in 2005, as he felt the canvas possessed “romantic connotations”—the linen ground is thus a distancing from painterliness.ii Though the work possesses the soft haze of a watercolor painting, it is visibly bifurcated by a central seam indicative of the process of its making in which the same rectangle is printed twice. In this manner, the work is the sum of both technological production and human intervention, capitalizing on the seeming perfection of the mechanical process and the imperfection of the human one. The work’s nuanced hues and gradients, as well as its margins of empty space, are imposed by the artist, introducing elements of chance and unpredictability.
“Despite their mechanical facture, these paintings feel more delicate and fragile than any in Guyton's oeuvre.”
—Scott Rothkopf
Since 2007, Guyton has produced his monochromes using a file of a black rectangle created in Photoshop. The black monochrome is a veritable icon of modern art. Famously, Kazimir Malevich claimed his 1915 Black Square was the first non-representational work and the culmination of the Modernist movement. A component of Malevich’s work was its transparency in terms of process, a strand which Guyton continues in his monochrome works. His process is self-evident in the discrepancies between the source image—a solid black rectangle—and the printed image riddled with flaws. His intentional misdirection, jamming and manipulation of the printer are evidence of the artist’s hand. Coupled with the random technical errors, his process is both aleatory and composed.
“Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems.”
—Andy Warhol
Guyton’s employment of seriality and machines calls attention to the processes of photoreproduction. While, traditionally, machines are used to achieve a precise and accurate result, the printed image is vulnerable to imperfection. By rejecting the antiseptic immaculateness of digital aesthetics, Guyton posits these defects as valuable transmutations that show the value of fallibility in art. The works elucidate the physical and visual properties of craft: tangible blemishes animate the work, insisting human fragility can endow a computational image with the frisson of art.
