A series of prints made from a single digital file by Wade Guyton, one of the most famous American artists, was recently on display at Geneva’s Mamco Museum (curator Nicolas Trembley). Some of these prints were shown in Munich at Brandhorst Museum in « Das New Yorker Atelier » exhibition.
Wade Guyton took a photo of his New York studio. An image, showing a fragment of his « Black Abstraction », 2007, as well as his sculpture from « Chair Sculptures » series, was then printed in 30 versions on a jet printer in L and XL sizes. Surrounded by this images at the exhibition in MAMCO, the viewer “decodes” the message and gets into the sprit of the artist’s impersonal, efficient work space of his studio in New York.
Thirty versions of huge non-figurative prints are about modernity and architectural leadership, about urbanism, advertising, impersonal style.
Wade Guyton’s non-art look styled prints get a special meaning in the exhibition halls of Geneva museum of Modern Art. Mamco’s collection includes works of conceptualists of 60s and 70s, such as Becher, V.Burgin and others, with a similar “visual emptiness” and monotonous repetition of one architectural motive in their art works.
Guyton’s art has lost connection to classical painting technique, the artist uses a digital camera, computer rendering and a multi-layer printing technology with a special process of loading of canvas into the machine, resulting in prints having two vertical parts.
Wade Gyuton’s « monologue » has passed through post-modernistic transformations, leading to a new fragmented style. There is no longer an author, but a scriptor. Wade Guyton’s vocabulary includes computer rendering, ad language, “spectalization of emptiness”, repetition, standardization, printing runs and puzzle.
Written by: Irina Vernichenko