Carl Fudge: Dazzle at Ronald Feldmand Fine Arts— Opens 2/20.

Carl Fudge, who combines digital technology with traditional art-making techniques, will exhibit unique prints that range from the monumental to the miniature. In his new series, Dazzle, he reconfigures woodcuts by Edward Wadsworth, a member of the short-lived British art movement called the Vorticists (1914-15). The Vorticists promoted a British brand of modernism which stressed geometric abstraction and the hard-edged precision of mechanical forms. In so doing Fudge suggests correspondences between the utopian vision of the Industrial Age and our current infatuation with digital technology. 

Fudge abstracts Wadsworth’s subjects – industrial scenes of North England and Dazzle ships, which were patterned with designs to confuse the enemy in World War I. With a triple turn, he deconstructs Wadsworth’s geometric shapes and hypnotic stripes to create a kaleidoscopic field of hard-edged forms that disorient the viewer. The graphic Platelayers (59” x 58”) is a lattice of planes that recede and project into space. The highly-detailed Disruption (80” x 59”) and Aground (75” x 118”), which are derived from dock scenes, include vestiges of Wadsworth’s vein of representation – cartoon-like workers, windows, and the glimmer of the outline of a ship. The silkscreen technique highlights the flat intense color relationships further fragmenting the compositional surface.