Undo Redo Return
Solo
Curated by Jeremy Akerman and Daniel Lancaster
Nick Fudge's exhibition "Undo Redo Return" presents a unique exploration of the intersection between contemporary digital imaging and painting. Fudge argues that digital technologies and graphics software have reversed the traditional hegemony of the original over the copy, and that as a result, modes of conceptual and stylistic appropriation in the visual arts herald an emerging paradigm shift away from authorial singularities towards a diverse, inclusive, and democratic multiplicity. His new media art practice conceptualizes the elevation of versions and copies over singularities, subverting outdated notions of authority and conferred status.
In one of Fudge's digital series, the artist appropriates the key works, styles, and techniques of old masters such as Rembrandt, Courbet, Ingres, and Picasso. He then subjects his digitally fabricated copies to the digital tool-preset logic of algorithmic transformation, resulting in a series of works that serve as philosophical statements on plurality, probability, and complexity. Fudge's works exist in an infinite regress, with each iteration building on and undermining the previous one.
The immersive installation in "Undo Redo Return" represents two different landscapes, a French country road rendered in vector graphics and a Californian desert rendered in raster graphics. The artist juxtaposes the romanticism of old-world Europe with the technological grandeur of Silicon Valley. The oil paintings and digital images superimposed on the landscapes create the effect of images existing in an augmented reality of displaced time and space. The paintings evoke the receding legacy of modernism, while the modernist styles fused with hyper-imaging techniques suggest an extended desertification of the image. Fudge's works create an exquisite yet uneasy tension between traditional art practices and new media technologies.
- The Source 1868 (after Gustave Courbet), 1994-2016
- Astral America, 1994-2016
At the heart of Nick Fudge's artistic practice is the notion of perception and the appearance of reality. His digital works in this exhibition appear to be prints of computer-generated screenshots of graphical user interfaces (GUIs), but they are actually rendered by hand using Adobe Illustrator's vector construction tools. By creating artworks that appear to be computer-generated, Fudge refreshes the mimetic tradition of the visual arts and critically examines the veracity of digitally constructed images.
Fudge's oil paintings, on display in this exhibition, explore the perceptual transformations that occur when artists move between traditional painting techniques and digital imaging software. With the aid of digital technology, artists are now able to produce images of reality that transcend conventional representations of natural phenomena and, as digital user interfaces (DUIs) commonly employ causal languages that allow users to repeatedly 'undo', 'redo', or 'escape' an action, a shift away from our shared perception of space-time reality towards a deeper acceptance of the superimposition of alternative realities (virtual, augmented, machine-generated) onto our lived experience of space-time reality.
The "Undo Redo" series showcases Fudge's ironic approach to undoing and redoing an image. Gestural brushstrokes are applied, undone, and repainted in reverse, in a back-and-forth between expressionist gesture and digitized grid. The process continues until the painting emerges as a "pixelated gestural abstraction".
In conclusion, "Undo Redo Return" is a remarkable and thought-provoking exhibition that encourages viewers to question their perception of reality. Fudge's work is ambitious and significant, especially as we move further into the digital age. His examination of the relationship between technology and reality is an important one to engage with and discuss.