Reality Drive is the title of a digital inkjet print by Nick Fudge. More precisely, it is an “ancient” digital print: a work whose development extends from 1994 to its eventual material output in 2015.

The image depicts an American road bordered by signs from which language has disappeared. Direction remains, but destination has been removed. The road promises orientation while leading towards an unspecified elsewhere: a reality drive whose reality cannot be located.

The work also offers an oblique image of the artist’s own history.

Fudge studied at Goldsmiths in London during the 1980s among artists later associated with the Young British Artists. Rather than enter the rapidly expanding art world that formed around this generation, he withdrew. For approximately twenty-five years, his work remained largely unexhibited.

During this period, paintings and digital files accumulated outside public view. His early digital works were stored on removable disks and ageing hardware. As technologies changed, access to them became increasingly uncertain. The works existed, but their existence no longer guaranteed their availability.

The archive entered a peculiar state: neither lost nor fully present. Files remained encoded on physical carriers that contemporary systems could no longer easily read. The supposedly immaterial image was revealed to depend upon highly specific forms of matter—drives, interfaces, operating systems, software versions and machines.

In 2010, Fudge began an expedition into this personal digital past. The artist became the archaeologist of his own media history, recovering works created in early versions of Illustrator and Photoshop and reconstructing the technical environments required to open them.

Media archaeology here is not merely an academic method. It is an autobiographical necessity. The artist excavates not a vanished civilisation, but a vanished technological present—one that had appeared, at the time, to represent the future.

Old files are reopened, translated and developed through newer software. Digital brush marks, painted pixelations and forms of computer abstraction emerge from this recursive process. Commands such as Edit, Undo and Redo become more than tools. They operate as pictorial and temporal principles.

Undo does not simply reverse an action. Redo does not simply restore it. Together they produce an image caught between possible states, a work whose history remains technically active within it. The picture does not proceed towards a single conclusion; it rehearses its own alternatives.

Chance enters through repetition, error, conversion and the uncertain behaviour of old files in new systems. The machine is not treated as a neutral instrument carrying out the artist’s intention. It becomes a second historical agent, capable of delay, resistance and misrecognition.

Fudge’s engagement with Cubism, Picasso, Velázquez and Jasper Johns is therefore not primarily a matter of quotation. Earlier pictorial systems are re-encountered through digital logic. Cubist fragmentation, layered viewpoints and signs detach themselves from their historical period and reappear as unexpected anticipations of screen space, vector construction and editable image states.

It can seem as though the older paintings somehow knew about the digital image before it existed. More precisely, the later technology reveals structures within them that had previously remained latent.

Fudge’s return to oil painting does not represent a retreat from digital work. The paintings establish another condition of visibility. They possess weight, surface and physical presence; they can be encountered without first recovering a lost operating system.

Yet this material certainty is deceptive. The digital works demonstrate that matter has not disappeared. It has changed its address. A dataset is not immaterial: it is distributed across code, storage media, software and the conditions of access. A digital work may be present as information while remaining absent as experience.

Many of Fudge’s works have no definitive output. They remain editable, revisable and capable of disappearing into another state. The final image is replaced by a suspended sequence of possible versions.

The exhibition therefore presents images that, in a strict technological sense, should perhaps no longer exist. They have survived their original machines, software and formats. Their visibility is already an improbable event.

In an age defined by excessive image production, these works ask for the opposite response: not another glance, but sustained attention. They demand that one look at what has survived the very technologies that promised unlimited reproduction.

Andreas Lau's work is very much concerned with the question: What am I really seeing? What is behind the person being portrayed? What's real?

To explore this theme, he filters and dissects the pictorial surfaces of his canvases with uniform grids, signs and dots, until the viewer can literally no longer 'see through' the matrix. The viewer is forced to ask these very questions.

"... The encryption of the theme is done through a kind of filter that he puts on the events and on the one hand holds together, on the other hand, but also destroyed. Lau finds his motives when leafing through newspapers. Interesting images with special contexts are cut out and collected... By imitating the existing structures with points, rectangles or lines in egg tempera he breaks the picture into signs... This creates an objectivity in the two-dimensionality, which gives the impression in some works that the faces bulge out of the ground. The physical approach of the viewer to a painting is actually intended to recognize more. The dissolution of the representation into pure pictorial means creates an opposite effect for Andreas Lau's works. Only from a distance can one make out what is represented, in the near-vision it begins to flicker before the eyes. " 

(Tessa Rosebrock MA Kunsthalle Karlsruhe /" Schicht / Sicht "Painting Andreas Lau p.56 / Modo-Verlag)

Can we really decipher what we see? Do we understand the stories behind the images? Clearly "no".

Pictures have been forged thousands of times. In the past and with great effort. Now forgeries are made with fast digital precision. Hardly recognizable as manipulation. As a forgery. As a weapon.

Digitization as a technology does not make the world safer. It is becoming a more dangerous place. It has little to do with truth and "perception"!

When Lau paints a tight-laced couple on a dance floor, one usually thinks of the depiction of two lovers. Both are clinging to each other in seemingly intimate devotion. Only the strangely contorted postures betray a certain disagreement. Something is not quite right. But what is it? Even the title of the work offers no explanation: "Lovers (The Dance)". That's exactly what you're supposed to see. Lau's technique of painting a linear screen-effect he creates a visual disturbance field that alters the impression. As a result of his method, the image begins to oscillate and to question itself. Viewed at close range the viewer even loses sight of the subject. What do you really see? What is behind those hanging, limp bodies? They are a 'dancing couple' from a dance marathon in the USA in the 1920s. Penniless people could earn money by dancing as long as possible without falling asleep. For a few dollars. No romance. No love. The viewer of the dancing couple sees what she wants to see, not reality. By learning the harsh reality of the dancing couple, the image is permanently altered so that the viewer can never see it as it was before. A seemingly innocent scene that contains an opposite reality. Lau calls such ambiguous images "situations".