If the artist regularly uses traditional painting supports, such as linen canvas, his compositions are designed directly on the screen, then materialized using industrial printers. As digital technologies evolve towards ever more sophistication, Guyton adapts his creative process by causing interference. He thus confronts his printer with orders that are too heavy on data and multiplies the passages of the canvas under the ink jet. Transfer errors and imperfections that then occur – runs or other printing defects – are purely random and contribute to a poetic reading of the works.

In 2022, the painting Untitled (2013) entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art thanks to a generous donation. It was from this painting that the exhibition – the artist’s first in a French museum – took shape. Created between 2013 and 2015, the five paintings are part of a very short period during which Guyton was particularly interested in the color black. Four of them were also designed from the same Photoshop file composed exclusively of black: the printed image competes with white, its reserve space. There is then established, within each canvas, an ambiguous relationship between figure and background and, more broadly, between the works and the wall which accommodates them. “I let the black paintings “de-become” paintings, or express themselves more architecturally,” affirms the artist, entrusting the surrounding space with the task of circumscribing the limits of the works. The porosity of the borders creates a tension between abstraction and figuration which should therefore allow each painting to find its right form. The fifth canvas in this set, never exhibited until now, extends this tension by juxtaposing two exhibition views on which the two monumental paintings presented here are precisely placed in abyss.

Curator: Julia Garimorth, assisted by Sylvie Moreau-Soteras

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