Wade Guyton: Untitled: 2007

What must it be like to be a painter these days, in an era that has seen almost 40 years of the "painting is dead" mantra. Are you being willfully archaic ? Defiantly romantic? In the digital era when a vast audience is starting to track art via the internet how do you contend with issues of reproduction in all senses of the expression? And can a painter make the same painting twice? A lot of these questions are being incisively addressed by the artist Wade Guyton who recently harnessed the inkjet printer and the flatbed scanner as tools in his production of paintings. His show last year at Friedrich Petzel featured "black paintings" generated in this fashion that interweaved ideas of the minimalist tradition with the post-industrial process of the computer. I thought it was brilliant that these "machine-made" works still bore the trace of human imperfection through the blurs and streaks and mistakes inherent in the limitations of the machines involved. When images were too big for the scanner, Guyton would scan the pieces in two halves, leaving the slight crease or gap that occurred by accident as a part of the work. When the ink faded or mis-registered, it allowed for the kind of variation on a mechanical theme that would have made Warhol's silkscreen glow acid green with envy. I love these paintings and dream of owning one of them some day soon. In the meantime I'll just find inspiration in Guyton's cleverness.