Wade Guyton's "New York Times Paintings," created in the late 2015 and showcased in a 2016 exhibition at Petzel Gallery, represents a notable series in his oeuvre that captures the intersection of digital culture and traditional art forms. These works are characterized by their use of images captured from The New York Times website, reflecting Guyton's interest in how news and media are consumed in the digital age. The process involves creating designs as digital files and printing them onto canvas using an Epson 9900 printer with UltraChrome HDR ink, underscoring the artist's innovative approach to art-making that merges digital technology with the materiality of paint on canvas.
Guyton's technique in this series echoes the practices of artists like Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool, who sought to minimize the presence of the artist's hand in their works. Similar to Warhol's embrace of silk screen printing and Wool's use of stencils, Guyton employs a large inkjet printer to transfer his digital designs onto canvas, a method that foregrounds the role of technology in the creative process. This approach emphasizes the transformation of digital gestures, such as taking screenshots, into tangible works of art, introducing "formal kinks" that result from the translation of JPEGs to canvas. The artist's method is both a nod to and a departure from traditional painting, proposing a dialogue between the mechanical and the manual, the instantaneous and the enduring.
Guyton's "New York Times Paintings" not only interrogate the medium of painting in the context of digital technology but also reflect on the temporality and ephemeral nature of news in the digital age. By selecting and immortalizing specific moments from The New York Times, Guyton invites viewers to consider the ways in which information is presented, consumed, and remembered in a rapidly changing digital landscape. The series, therefore, stands as a compelling exploration of contemporary issues surrounding media, technology, and art, highlighting Guyton's role as a critical observer of the digital age (Wikipedia) (Petzel Gallery).