Guyton\Walker
Untitled is a more muted offering from Guyton/Walker, the collaborative twosome better known for their glaringly bright palette and compositional chaos. A jumbled chandelier of bare lightbulbs, plaster-cast coconuts, and glass globes, the work is all but drained of the duo's colours. It is not, however, without their entropy. Suspended by exposed wiring and hung in haphazard arrangement, the work has about it an implicit threat, intended or otherwise. One needn’t be reminded of the fatal impact of a falling coconut, let alone a glass globe. Formally, Untitled continues Guyton/Walker’s preoccupation with the repetition of shapes and polka dots – the coconut a pictorial device that connects more abstract pursuits to their theme of fruit bowl.
b.1972, Hammond
b.1969, Columbus
Brash, garish, outrageously loud – welcome to the world of Guyton/Walker, the collaborative project of artists Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker. Together, the duo extends appropriation, reproduction and repetition to migrainous effect. “Derivative with a vengeance” – in the words of critic Roberta Smith – they collage together references borrowed from Pop Art, Op Art, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism (though there is nothing minimal to their visual excess). Their work, Smith writes, is “painting about painting, art about art, references about references to the nth degree.” To this, Guyton/Walker add their recurring motifs of bananas, coconuts, paint cans, flags, and chicken bones. The effect is overwhelming, even seizure-inducing, with checkerboard patterns and Day-Glo colours. Guyton/Walker’s “funhouse formalism” is the coincidence of visual signs cleaved from their cultural import, becoming instead elements in abstracted compositions. For all the chaos of their imagery, there remains a distinct seduction to the pair’s colourful indulgences and visually saturated surfaces. Their materiality, too, is intriguing – their images more often printed or silkscreened onto unexpected objects – mattresses, drywall, tables, and cloth.