Cubist Guitars in Digital Color Space revisits Nick Fudge’s early digital works through the lens of contemporary Gen-AI, creating recursive feedback loops between past and future—where each cycle of reanimation generates unexpected, new outcomes.

Originally based on a 2010s animation featuring nine stylised cubist guitars, the series draws on multiple layers of reference: Picasso’s early modernist guitar constructions, Jasper Johns’s 1960s investigations into the syntax of painting, Warhol’s Pop embrace of mechanical reproduction, and Fudge’s own long-standing engagement with the materiality of digital tools.

Rather than simple updates, these new works operate as re-performances of a digital medium in flux—where AI serves not just as a generator, but as a means of probing how images, styles, and software histories repeat, distort, and evolve across time. Fudge’s broader practice—spanning painting, print, installation, and digital media—consistently engages art historical themes, using contemporary technologies such as AI not simply as tools, but as conceptual instruments for examining the memory, instability, and transformation of visual culture itself.

The collection unfolds across five works—Pure_Data_Breve_1, Pure_Data_Breve_IKB_2, Pure_Data_Breve_3, Pure_Data_Breve_4, and Pure_Data_Breve_5—each exploring a distinct facet of digital cubism. From hypnotic recursive patterns to Yves Klein Blue dreamscapes, glitch-inflected geometries, quantum spaces of rhythm and light, and vibrant fields of fractured guitars, together they form a multifaceted exploration of how digital memory and modernist traditions intersect in the age of AI.

Pharmacie, a moving image piece from Nick Fudge's Picasso Pizazz collection, represents the convergence of modernist aesthetics and machine futurism from a meta-modern, technologically advanced perspective. Set in the French town of Honfleur, the birthplace of the eccentric composer Erik Satie (who is represented in the collection), Pharmacie brings together three avant-garde modernists. The work depicts a Citroën Picasso, a symbol of modern mechanization, reflected and refracted through an animated sequence that alludes to painted abstraction (a genre Picasso avoided) and the algorithmic recursions that drive machine-generated images. Duchamp's presence in this evolving mise-en-scène is represented by reductive iterations of the Pharmacie, with its flashing green sign as the work's finale; the work references Duchamp's (assisted) readymade Pharmacie with its conceptual play on commercial and mundane objects transformed into art. The work alludes to mimetic representations of nature in art and to machine learning algorithms represented in the design of the Citroën as shifting mirror reflections and abstract refractions.