About the Work
PICASSO CO.
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Drawing on the legacy of Pablo Picasso and Francis Picabia, Nick Fudge’s PICASSO Co. reflects on how artists have responded to the rise of machines—from the first industrial revolution's mechanical advances to today’s digital and algorithm-driven age. The work draws a line between past and present, showing how that legacy continues to shape artistic expression in the era of AI and automation. Nick Fudge’s PICASSO Co. began as a near-replica of Picasso’s 1936 portrait of Dora Maar, originally painted in vibrant red, yellow, and blue. Over time, Fudge gradually reworked the image in grayscale—a deliberate act of desaturation that shifts both the tone and meaning of the original, while also bringing it into dialogue with Francis Picabia’s 1920 painting Le Lierre unique eunuque (The Unique Eunuch Ivy), where mechanical forms are rendered as soft, organic, cell-like structures in grayscale. Fudge reverses Picabia’s gesture: rather than humanizing the machine, he mechanizes the human, transforming Dora Maar into a cool, machinic abstraction. In doing so, PICASSO Co. stages a layered conversation between two key modernists, reframing their innovations through the lens of a contemporary era defined by infinite digital reproduction and algorithmic logic—where the image no longer holds a singular aura, but is endlessly mutable, replicable, and coded.PICASSO Co. draws a sharp, ironic line through the history of mechanized and automated modernism. The vertical inscription “PICASSO Co.” along the painting’s edge directly echoes the “MACHINE Co.” from Picabia’s Le Lierre unique eunuque, but with a twist. While Picabia satirized industrial branding and typographic aesthetics in line with his Dadaist roots, Fudge redirects Picabia’s critique toward Picasso—rendering him as a key figure in modernism’s shift toward cultural industrialization, a trajectory later amplified by Warhol. Despite Picasso’s humanist intentions, his prolific output, constant stylistic reinvention, and transformation into a global brand evoke the very mechanisms of mass production he once resisted. In this framing, Fudge doesn’t just reference Picasso and Picabia; he implicates them both within a recursive system of production, reproduction, subversion, and reinvention.At the same time, Fudge engages with the playful visual and linguistic ambiguity of Picabia’s work—particularly the title Le Lierre unique eunuque - itself drawn from a 1920 Dada poetry collection that layers sound play, hermaphroditism, and regeneration. These themes reappear in Fudge’s treatment of Dora Maar’s portrait, now reimagined as a soft, schematic, and post-biological figure. Rather than celebrating the human or the machine, PICASSO Co. opens up a window onto their entanglement—where portraiture becomes mechanomorphic, and meaning itself becomes fluid, cybernetically recursive, and unstable. In doing so, Fudge extends the early 20th-century questions of authorship, technē, and reproduction into a contemporary landscape shaped by digital imaging and algorithmic systems. The result is a metamodern meditation on artistic identity and gesture within a posthuman, post-medium world.
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