Exhibit of the week: Wade Guyton OS

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through Jan. 13

“The Whitney Museum has a hit on its hands,” said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The first major survey of Wade Guyton’s work is “making a cogent case” for an artist who is stretching the definition of painting. “Both a radical and a traditionalist,” the 40-year-old Indiana native uses desktop computers, scanners, and printers to create “austere, glamorous” images that give off a “quiet poetry” despite their office-tech origins. Feeding sheets of linen into ink-jet machines, Guyton produces paintings that “combine the abstract motifs of generic modernism” and the recycling strategies of Andy Warhol and such Pictures Generation artists as Sherrie Levine. These works “clearly tax the equipment that generates them,” producing skips and smears that make a viewer keenly aware that machines can be almost human-like in their fallibility.

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The results create a “depressing” scene, said Lance Esplund in Bloomberg.com. Guyton has become a darling of many critics, but all he does is recycle other artists’ ideas. At his worst, he merely appropriates art reproductions or photographs of architecture and puts blots, circles, and X’s or U’s on them as he runs them through his printer. “Dozens of these vandalized images” litter the Whitney show, but “like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox,” each one feels “diluted and lifeless.” And his sculpture is no better. More than once, he has taken a Marcel Breuer chair and reshaped its bent tubular steel into a new piece that suggests only “an unbent paper clip.”

But if Guyton hasn’t made art history yet, he’s well on his way to doing so, said Jerry Saltz in New York magazine. Traditionalists might dislike his use of printers, but those folks “let ideology get in the way of the retinal payoff of his work.” Guyton has essentially “invented a new paintbrush,” and he’s so adept with it that looking at his oscillations of pigment and texture is “like seeing a mechanical aurora borealis.” He does recycle too much. The way he uses stripes, dots, collage, and text is so conventional, “it’s as if he’s covering the classic rock of modernism, minimalism, and post-minimalism,” merely “re-enacting the tried and true.” Still, he’s “arrived at something powerful.” If he can get past his nostalgia for art’s past hits, there’s no telling what his “brave new paintbrush” might do.