Wade Guyton

"I make paintings, but I don't think of myself as a painter". Statements like this one introduce Wade Guyton's unconventional approach to art-making, in which traditional processes and implements-paint and brush, for example-are supplanted by digital means. In 2002 Guyton first began working with computer imaging software and an ink-jet printer, initially printing letters or simple shapes on magazine pages and, shortly thereafter, experimenting with non-paper supports, feeding raw or primed linen through the machine to realize his compositions. The resultant "Printer Drawings" and "Printer Paintings," respectively, flaunt their hybrid status in name and in makeup-unique works produced by a mechanical process.
 
Guyton's practice is exemplary of a new approach to technology shared by many artists of his generation who maintain a skepticism toward both the subjective artist's hand and slick, high-end fabrication. For Guyton, the ubiquitous home-office technology of the ink-jet printer offered the perfect middle ground, with its common technical failures like paper jams and ink clogs-especially rampant as he pushed the machine to its limits with unorthodox materials-integrating a degree of chance into his process to which he could respond or leave untended. Digital fabrication allowed Guyton to remain grounded in conceptual ideologies while exploring the structural specificities of his material process-a classic modernist gambit.
 
After more than a decade of manipulating the same technology, using ever-larger and more professional models, Guyton has become quite adept at managing and even predicting potential mishaps-a "virtuoso of the ink-jet printer," as he has been called. Like a traditional master printer, who can anticipate with exquisite precision the final tonal ranges and line quality that an aquatint will produce, Guyton knows that some materials may need an extra tug to glide through the printer and that certain colors are more likely to pool than others. Furthermore, by establishing a set of digital motifs to be recycled throughout his work-typed Xs and Us, filled-in black rectangles, and a scanned image of flames, to name a few-the artist has become deeply familiar with their nuances of scale and form, as well as how they might register any number of technical incidents. While initiated through keystrokes, the realization of Guyton's work involves a surprising degree of physicality and mastery-an unmistakable human element that manages and negotiates the otherwise automated process.

This growing expertise has led to more ambitious undertakings, from printing on plywood to enlarging paintings to even grander scales. The monumental work that the artist has produced for "Empire State" draws on a motif first used in small drawings from 2004: a red-and-green-striped image, culled from the endpapers of a book. An encore to the site-specific diptych based on this image that was commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, this new work positions itself against the Palazzo delle Esposizioni's Neoclassical architecture, a symbol of Rome's cultural prowess that linked the burgeoning late-nineteenth-century capital to its imperial past. Challenging the pristine symmetries and soaring columns of the renowned exhibition hall, Guyton's bold yet imperfect horizontal lines serve as transgressions, breaking the academic mold while demonstrating the infinite, generative potential within the artist's own body of work.

Kim Conaty