This painting—featuring a parade of X's marching across the canvas—is a variation on an earlier drawing in which Guyton typed the characters onto a sheet of paper. He made this painting by folding a piece of linen in half vertically and pulling it through an inkjet printer, so the two halves were created autonomously and successively. In this way, the artist relinquished control over smudges, streaks, blurs, overlaps, and alignment. He relied on the effects of chance and mechanical reproduction—two central strategies in twentieth-century artistic production—which he updated using twenty-first-century home-office technology.
Gallery label from What is Painting? Contemporary Art from the Collection, July 7–September 17, 2007 .
