Some of the imagery is familiar: a studio floor; enlarged bitmap files; recent newscaptured from the New York Times website; paintings in process lying on the floor;a chair sculpture; a view from the studio on a rainy day. In addition, there are close-ups of other paintings and ink runs, caning from a Breuer chair, and a deer foundwashed ashore. This time around the paintings are wetter and the colours moresaturated. And layers drift from one painting to another.

For the exhibition the artist had added two windows to the gallery.

John Kelsey writes:

In one of his new paintings, Wade Guyton returns the New York Times onlineinterface to an inky materiality which many contemporary viewers won’t haveexperienced firsthand. We know this news is digital because some of the articles aredated ‘2 minutes ago.’ Meanwhile, it’s funny to read ‘Today’s Paper’ on the canvas,as if the algorithmically engineered information we consume by the minute wasstill dreaming that its physical, daily body hadn’t long since vanished. Here, Guytongives the news a new body, gloriously plastic and real, raked with hyper-saturatedcolours he’s amped in Photoshop by forcing the curves and saturation levels of thescreenshot image. News about Macron and Trump, the weather and data theft arrivesdrippingly vivid in the paintings. As if materialising an unseen dimension of therefresh function: cognitive dissonance, dread, and our own disappearance within theinterface. What does abstraction look like today? Where does information end andpainting begin? And if we’ve stopped believing the news is true, can we agree that it’sbeautiful again?

The colours in these works are not always chosen by the artist but often result fromalgorithmic and gestural interference, accidents proliferating between the digitallayers and the material moments of his process. These are paintings composed ofboth content and accident. As Guyton exposes his images to varying degrees ofnoise, he reveals and welcomes what is unplanned, unthought and unconsumedin contemporary experience. Meanwhile, amid the digital interference and thematerial chaos of running ink, a memory of modernist aesthetics persists in theartist’s penchant for regular, rectangular forms. ‘Windows’ of digital and painterlyinformation are rotated 90 or 180 degrees, or flipped. The canvas itself is a modernsurvivor, and here Guyton sticks to his standard 84 X 69-inch format. One paintingis based on an image of a Breuer chair’s woven cane seat, while in another, thechrome tube is freed from its iconic form. A killed deer is doubled on one canvas,recalling Warhol’s equation of seriality and death. And now, half a century afterWarhol, mechanical reproduction feels weird again. Market metrics and quantifiedscaling have invaded every image and every human experience. Experience itself ismechanically reproduced and mediated... predicted, targeted, scaled, distributed.Whatever remains of the artwork’s aura is now steeped in doubt and dread. AndGuyton finds way to make even this beautiful, or at least vivid.

The artist has organised his own feedback loop at his Bowery studio: photos taken ofstill-wet works are sent back through Guyton’s process, fed back into the algorithmsand returned via Epson printers as new paintings, which are then sometimesphotographed in turn. Opening the otherwise closed system of his aesthetic machineto interference at each step of his process, Guyton continuously generates surpriseand unplanned beauty. It’s a rigorous system until it glitches or breaks down. Rigourand glitch, in every image. It’s a self-documenting process, feeding itself back intoitself until something new is seen. The bodies of the artist and his team are allinvolved, and the old creaky floorboards of the studio continue to appear alongsidethe monochrome bitmaps and other abstract noise. All this becomes hyper-present inits moment of vanishing. Vanishing itself is made vivid before our eyes.

Wade Guyton (b. 1972, Hammond, IN) has presented work in many solo institutionalexhibitions, the latest of which was a twenty-year retrospective at the MuseumLudwig, Cologne (2019). Other important solo shows have been hosted by institutionssuch as the Serpentine Gallery, London (2017); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2017);Museo MADRE, Naples (2017); MAMCO, Geneva (2016); Le Consortium, Dijon &Académie Conti, Vosne-Romanée (2016); Kunsthalle Zürich (2013); Whitney Museumof American Art, New York (2012-2013); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010); MuseumDhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (2009); Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2008); and theKunstverein in Hamburg (2005). He lives and works in New York.