Wade Guyton at Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum has a hit on its hands: a beautiful show organized by a young curator that makes a cogent case for the work of a young artist. In a season when many New York museums are devoting a lot of energy to the past, the Whitney's survey of work by Wade Guyton stands out as a cause for optimism. Yes, interesting art is being made here and now. And yes, there are serious ways that museums can present this art that are beyond the scope of even the richest commercial galleries. Wade Guyton, The Rachofsky Collection, Lamay Photo Wade Guyton: OS features this untitled work from 2006 at the Whitney Museum. Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is 40, is both a radical and a traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a different configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though devised using a computer, scanner and printer. The show is titled "Wade Guyton: OS," referring to computer operating systems. Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider himself a painter. His vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as well as much enlarged X's and U's and occasional scanned images, combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the recycling strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. One of his principal themes, which he endlessly cites and parodies yet reveres, is Modernism as an epochal style of art, design and architecture that permeates our culture from the artist's loft to the corporate boardroom. Another is modernity as an inescapable current condition, personified in his case by his adaptation, as just another kind of paintbrush, of the digital technology that pervades our everyday lives. While clearly not made by hand, his works are noticeably imperfect. The paintings in particular clearly tax the equipment that generates them; they emerge with glitches and irregularities - skids, skips, smears or stutters - that record the process of their own making, stress the almost human fallibility of machines and provide a semblance of pictorial incident and life. The line between what the artist has chosen and what technology has willed is constantly blurred. For one thing, to achieve paintings of substantial width, Mr. Guyton must fold his canvas and run it through the printer twice; this gives nearly every image halves that are rarely in sync. You will notice this right off the elevator, where the exhibition's first wall features five paintings of oddly off-register images of flames, each punctuated by large, often fragmented U's. Even more emphatic discrepancies are apparent in an extended eight-panel work in which thick black horizontal bands alternating with white ones skittishly slant every which way but level; their jangling patterns form a rhythmic, slow-motion Op Art. The Guyton show has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a 36-year-old Whitney curator who has also written a convincing if overlong catalog essay illuminating this artist's development, and he plotted, in collaboration with Mr. Guyton, a brilliant installation. More than 80 works are on view, mostly paintings but also computer drawings and a few sculptures. Dating primarily from the last decade, they are displayed on and among a series of parallel walls, some quite narrow. As you move around, works seem to slide in and out of view, like images in different windows on a computer screen. The changing vistas reveal the artist's motifs migrating restlessly from one scale or medium to another. The U's from the fire images are extruded into three dimensions in a group of 17 sculptures of mirrored stainless steel in 10 different sizes. Placed in a tight row they form the show's one instance of physical perfection and suggest an irregular sculpture by Donald Judd but are in fact individual works, temporarily brought together. Born in Hammond, Ind., Mr. Guyton absorbed the critical theory of the 1970s and "80s as an art major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville before seeing much art. And according to Mr. Rothkopf's essay Mr. Guyton still enjoys looking at paintings in books as much as at the real thing, intrigued by the ways photographs alter and distort them. He came to New York in 1996 to attend graduate school at Hunter College, and his first exhibited works here were sculptures that evoked an ersatz Modernism, most effectively in pieces casually executed in smoked and mirrored plexiglass. In 2002 he began appropriating images by a method more direct than his Pictures Generation elders. Instead of rephotographing photographs, he simply tore illustrations from books or auction catalogs and ran them through his printer, superimposing lines, X's, thick bands or grids on their images. In one drawing here two dark yellow X's printed on an image of a modern kitchen perfectly match a cabinet, suggesting that color-coordinated abstract art is essential to a stylish home. In another, a series of thick horizontal bars partly obscure an old half-timbered building whose geometric patterns are structurally necessary, not decorative. "Wade Guyton: OS" runs through Jan. 13 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.