Gallery: Wiener Secession
Artist: GUYTON, WADE
Time: 27.05.2011 – 21.08.2011
In his exhibition Zeichnungen für ein kleines Zimmer (Drawings For A Small Room) at the Secession, American artist Wade Guyton shows small-format works characterized by a minimalist formal vocabulary. As his support medium, he uses pages from old art, architecture and lifestyle magazines which he prints over with an inkjet printer. The abstract idiom devised by the artist on the computer using standard word processing software and the results of this work process are imposed by the fluctuating quality of the printing technology. The works are often ripped or crumpled, with more or less ink applied, plus errors and problems of saturation.
Wade Guyton leaves his artworks to mechanical chance. Using a standard inkjet printer, he reproduces non-figurative compositions on canvas or paper. Specific combinations of image and imprint have different effects that are never entirely intended: sometimes theresult appears serious, weighty and considered, while other times it seems unintentional and casual.
Guyton’s work recalls the production aesthetic of movements like Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. His praxis addresses issues of appropriation and the originality of the artwork, as well as timely manifestations of ordinary everyday copying and pasting. But even his choice of materials is at odds with purist discourse: prefabricated supports whose maximum width is dictated by industry standards, and thoroughly regulated computer programs and colour schemes that are more or less immune to the decisions of the artist subject.