Fudge’s years travelling through the United States appear to have consolidated a preference for working at a distance from the professional structures of the art world. The difficulty posed by this period is not simply that much of the work remained unseen, but that the artist declined to provide the explanatory account through which its absence might have been converted into an intelligible position.

As the 2016 Malvern Report, subsequently noted in The Times, observed, Fudge had repeatedly engaged in the destruction of his own work. The practice began while he was a student, initially as an attempt to interrupt the institutional question of what might properly qualify as “art.” Whether these actions constituted a coherent programme at the time remains uncertain. Their consequences, however, were unusually consistent: works were removed from circulation before institutions, critics or markets could establish a durable relation to them.

In retrospect, Fudge’s withdrawal can be interpreted as both a political and an economic decision, although this may attribute to it a degree of strategic coherence the artist has never claimed. By separating artistic production from the expectation of exhibition, recognition or financial return, he acquired the freedom to risk failure without requiring that failure to become culturally productive. The same decision also made it persistently difficult for the art market to conduct business with him.

Accounts of Fudge’s journeys through the American Midwest have encouraged the figure of the artist as maverick. Yet this figure may belong less to Fudge’s self-understanding than to the critical need to render prolonged non-participation legible as a recognisable form of artistic identity. “The road,” in this account, becomes an explanatory image applied retrospectively to a practice that otherwise resists narrative continuity.

The complaint may therefore be stated quite precisely. Fudge has offered neither a reliable declaration of intent nor an adequately stable chronology. Works appear obliquely, often under conditions that restrict their visibility; statements arrive intermittently and tend to complicate the objects they might reasonably have been expected to clarify. The interpretative burden is consequently transferred to the critic without the customary assurance that interpretation will be confirmed, or even acknowledged, by its subject.

What produces unease is not that the work is without meaning, but that it withholds the administrative conditions under which meaning is ordinarily made manageable: a declared intention, an accessible object, a continuous career and a dependable relation between production and exchange.