A new series of paintings that are ostensibly black monochromes. Made with an Epson large-format printer in the same manner as the paintings he has been producing for the last three years, these works are printed on factory-primed linen intended for oil painting and not inkjet printing.
For his first solo show at Chantal Crousel Gallery, Wade Guyton presents a new series of paintings
that are ostensibly black monochromes. Made with an Epson large-format printer in the same
manner as the paintings he has been producing for the last three years, these works are printed on
factory-primed linen intended for oil painting and not inkjet printing. Recently, the artist noticed
that some of the linen he received from the factory reacted differently to the inkjet printer than
those he had previously. The marks, images, and letters he was printing became absorbed into the
porous surface rather than “sitting on the surface”. These paintings were set aside as failed works
and these new rolls of linen as unusable material. Because of this difference in the ink’s interaction
with the surface, the artist began to overprint these paintings with a Photoshop-drawn rectangle
“filled” with the colour black. By repetitively overprinting, an unexpected painterly process
developed. The artist proceeded to use the blank “defective” material in the same way printing
the same file over and over. As each painting is made, it transcribes a visual record of the printer’s
actions: the trace of movement of the print heads, the varying states of their clogged-ness, the track
marks of the wheels on wet ink all mixed with the scratches and smears on the paintings from
being dragged across the floor to be fed back into the printer again.
This show is the second iteration of the installation of the monochromes and the black plywood
floor, the first instance being at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York in November 2007.
Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana. He lives and works in New York.
His work most recently appeared in Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (curator : Scott Rothkopf).
He will have a solo exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt, in september, and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle-
Belgium, as well as Ludwig Museum, Cologne, in 2009. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern
Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the MAMCO, Musée d’Art Moderne et
Contemporain, Geneva ; the Neue Pinakothek, Münich ; the Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich.
opening april 26, 2008
Galerie Chantal Crousel
10 rue Charlot - Paris
Free admission