Wade Guyton

Galerie Chantal Crouzel, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This painting is in excellent condition. The anomalies in the ink application and the smudges and slight creases in the canvas are inherent to the artist's process in which the canvas is folded in half vertically and pulled through a digital ink-jet printer. Very close inspection under raking light reveals a minute indention towards the top left corner, 5 ½ in. from the top edge, which is possibly inherent to the artist's working process. Under UV, there are no apparent restorations. This canvas is not framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Wade Guyton's Untitled from 2007, is an iconic example by one of the most integral contemporary artists of the current generation. It depicts the artist's trademark X form, rendered boldly in large-scale black ink against a white background. Like much of the artist's oeuvre, it is informed by chance and spontaneity while concurrently investigating the essence and limits of mechanization. Guyton, inspired by the intellectual endeavors of his Dadaist predecessors, challenges the limits of painting, or rather the limited way most people think about art. Like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, he blurs the boundaries between "high" and "low". and re-invents appropriation in a new minimalist language.

Guyton's works reveal themselves as a product of mechanical reproduction, reflecting his practice of making artworks using commercial inkjet printers. His compositions are conceived on a computer and executed on a printer, an experiment that began with the artist's early "drawings" in 2000. The artist would cover found imagery from a mixture of primary sources (exhibition catalogues, monographs and architecture books) with black X's, a process both signifying and validating the reproduced image in the modern world.

In 2006, Guyton jumped from paper to linen, pulling gigantic swathes of fabric through the ink-jet printer while it reads from a computer file. In order to fit the linen into the printer, which is forty-four inches wide, he folds the support executing one side and then the other so that the piece is bisected by a central unpainted seam and we are left with an "X" which is slightly askew, interrupted, and disconnected.

The current work, evocative of this characteristic style, presents a large printed "X" with a divisive line down its axis. Both halves are disjointedly united in a distorted way, whereas the left side appears comparatively clean, the right side embraces drips and track marks of the printer wheels. These uncontrollable aberrations and pattern glitches render Guyton's hands-off method untraditionally painterly. The mechanical process highlights many questions about authorship and true painting, yet the abstraction and physicality arrived at through the printing process communicates a vocabulary of uniqueness. With its attendant skips, spurts, drips and smears, the work powerfully asserts an innovative non-traditional form of painting and affirms the continued relevance of the old guard giants of appropriation; Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool.