Reena Spaulings presents an exhibition of new paintings by Wade Guyton. With Supply Chain, the artist’s Bowery studio comes into focus as both site and a go-to source of continuously updated painterly information: images of the physical place, details of works in progress, close-ups of inkjet printers printing and zoomed-in views of digital bitmaps are fed back through an ongoing process and output as a series of standard-sized works. Here we see the workplace fractured, shifted and amplified. The red of freshly printed apples lights up a composition of grimy sheetrock and kitchen clutter. Still-wet surfaces are rephotographed in detail and in transit as they pass through the Epson 9900, generating possibilities of new works before they are even finished. Guyton’s inkjet paintings now bring rising temperatures and harsher, more electric UltraChrome colors. Meanwhile, image files opened on the desktop reveal hidden structure and noise, magnified and mined for fresh compositional energy. As digital information is returned to the real world, such images are further subjected to liquid flows, bodily contact and material accident.
Guyton’s installation of twelve new paintings also includes a Manhattan cityscape looking Southwest toward the Freedom Tower at night, an image of the New York Times website on November 30, 2021, and a Goya still life recently seen at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.
As facts and fantasies of a New York art studio become the source of painting’s content and processual logic too, the means of production seem to dream their own infinity as image, series, intensity. The gallery, meanwhile, becomes a kind of double and displacement of the studio, re-staging the site of production as a walk-in image for New York: the hallucination of a Wade Guyton show in lower Manhattan today. Supply Chain involved an epically short walk between the Bowery and East Broadway, back and forth many times… from studio to gallery and back again.
Wade Guyton (b. 1972, Hammond, IN) has presented solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York (2012), the Museum Brandhorst in Munich (2017) and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2019). The artist lives and works in New York.
