Nick Fudge, one of the original YBAs, resurfaced in 2015 after a long period of solitary and secretive art-making. A former protégé of Michael Craig-Martin and Jon Thompson, Fudge infamously destroyed his Goldsmiths work on the eve of his graduation show and absconded to the US to embark on an early 1990s postmodern vision quest. Fudge’s meticulously-trained and art-historically informed paintings, drawings and prints, which improvised on the Renaissance Old Masters, were seismically altered both by his encounter with the majestic highways of the American West and by his discovery of early Apple image editing software designed for the Macintosh Classic II — itself codenamed the ‘Montana’. Apple computers became Fudge’s ersatz studio, where he spent years reproducing by hand, the visual architecture of the programs themselves onto his manipulated images as allegorical framing devices; as well as key works of the modernist canon in vector and raster programs - playing with their fractures and erasures, glitches and rotations. Of the literally thousands of digital works Fudge has made over the course of twenty-five years, a small percentage have found their way into the materiality of paint or print, ensuring their continued existence after the inevitable (and imminent) collapse of the digital matrix. Given Fudge’s penchant for ‘delay’ in the Duchampian sense, coupled with the ever-increasing obsolescence of his Macintosh Classic II and its legacy software, it seems only a matter of time before all these images disappear forever - like "tears in the rain", so to speak - rendering invaluable those paintings and prints that manage to emerge from his imperilled archive. By using delay to chasten his output, Fudge has built a fortress of solitude in cyberspace that allows him to create asynchronous works - works that are both in and out of the present, and also somehow in the future. In this way, Fudge reconceptualises something of Duchamp’s thought for the neoliberal digital age, but from a post-Internet perspective of the apocalypse.​