Wade Guyton

Continuing our bi-weekly artist posts, our latest profile is on post-conceptual artist Wade Guyton. You can keep up to date with our artist profiles by checking the ArtList blog and learn more about Guyton works at ArtList.co. 

Guyton creates paintings without considering himself a painter. In true post-internet fashion, he uses printers, scanners and computers to affect his images, rather than applying ink to canvas by hand.

That’s how it started. I was trying to do these stupid marker drawings, something hard-edged and geometric, and I got so bored. It was too much work. I could just type the same thing into the computer, and the printer did a much better job. — Wade Guyton (Interview Magazine)

Guyton creates his own geometric images on his computer or applies geometric markings to a scanned image before printing it onto a canvas that he feeds into his Epson Stylus Pro 9600 (having to fold the canvas in half to fit it into the printer).

Untitled, 2006 (Wade Guyton)

In 2013, Guyton’s work was the subject of a solo survey exhibit on the artist. The show included some of Guyton’s flame paintings, in which Guyton adorns scanned images of flames with letters and geometrical shapes.

The series demonstrates how technology can contain something as wild powerful as fire, and the tensions this creates between the mechanic and the natural.

Guyton maintains that there is still a space for error and creativity, even when working with machines in the internet age. He preserves the imperfections that his canvases develop from paper jams, ink clogs or from simply being dragged across his studio.

He asserts that there is still space for individuality and human error in the internet age; he gives us hope that we can retain humanity in the face of, and even in conjunction with, technology.

Untitled, 2006 (Courtesy of the Whitney Museum)

He also gives us hope for the future of the art world.

Last year, Guyton tried to torpido his own auction sale by threatening to produce copies of his fire series, in order to dissuade the prospective seller. Guyton is a vocal oponent to the unjust duopoly of the auction house giants; a mission that we at ArtList share in splitting our commission on all sold works 50/50 with artists.

Guyton lives and works in New York City. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also been part of two-person exhibitions at the Petzel Gallery in new York, the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna.

You can acquire a Wade Guyton print now at artlist.co