Wade Guyton

While the print media industry bemoans the current crisis, the Conceptual artist Wade Guyton from the US (born 1972 in Hammond, USA) has had remarkable success with the medium of print. Guyton’s printed pictures are not created manually – in place of a brush, he uses printer, Adobe Photoshop, bitmap files, and scanner. He selects pages from magazines, catalogs, and books that he then analyzes and manipulates before scanning them, after which he uses a computer program to decide where the printer should apply paint – what should remain readable, and what should be covered with paint, or even made unrecognizable. Finally, he runs the canvases through huge printers. Naturally, mistakes are inevitable when printing the colored areas; there are smudges, signs of damage, and other digital disruptions. The results are primarily monochrome pictures and arrangements of stripes, lines, and dots, as well as other abstract configurations whose surfaces display an intriguing tactile quality. In this way, Wade Guyton reinvents the act of painting, building on the works of the representatives of Appropriation Art (in which already existing aesthetic materials are appropriated and manipulated) with his own unique method of producing pictures. While his process of making pictures is doubtless somewhat bizarre, its results show a great clarity. Guyton appears to be paying homage to the more efficient, mechanical modes of production, or to be focusing on the painter’s ability to contribute something mathematical to the gray area between painting and printing techniques on one level, and the computer and printer on another. Yet, his pictorial language and composition is inspired by well-known strategies from Modernism, Minimalism, and Post-Minimalism. Seen from a distance, his large pictures, which cover entire walls, are reminiscent of Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt, and Joseph Marioni. However, their forms remind us of the abstract play with proportions in Minimal Art.
Unable to be easily identified as prints due to their uncommonly large size, their expansiveness inspires us to experience and explore the space around us.

Dominique von Burg