Installation View The Young Pines, J8, 1996. The Young Pines, J2, 1996.

carl fudge at lauren wittels gallery by Michael Brennan This is Carl Fudge's second one-man show with Lauren Wittels, the first in her new space, and there has been some change in his work. These new paintings are entirely more rigid, with their brittle silk- screened veins of enamel that rise upon gessoed wood panels. Small imprinted patterns dissolve all over and under one another to create an ever-shifting mesh of image and color distortion. The silk- screened images are derived from the Japanese erotic woodblock prints called Ukiyo-E, though the images are so fragmentary that they are ultimately indecipherable. The images could just as easily be derived from Chilton auto-repair manuals or U.S. Geological Survey Maps and the end result would be essentially the same, because of the thoroughness of Fudge's technique. What is most meaningful about Carl Fudge's work is what you are finally seeing, the visible picture, and not what is encrypted underneath layers of paint and process. Upon close inspection of the tiny sections, one can make out strange folding reversals, or mirror-image-type melding, and thin, electric hieroglyphics, sometimes with bleeding lines, but these do not reveal content. Because of their placement these patches of popping color create a superstructure that forms an advancing, sheeting lattice, not a grid, of what might be described as the visual equivalent of feedback, a wall of white noise. This is particularly evident in the three larger multi-paneled paintings, which are the densest paintings. Puce is a big painting, with a beveled swallow-tail backside. Its slow rhythm and gently hypnotic pulse are painted in Fudge's usual bug colors: orange, black and yellow. The crushing density of the large paintings destroys any decorative by-product which is frequently the goal of any sort of pattern and repetition painting process. A lot could be said about this kind of serial, mechanical process and its appearance in most post-Pop type painting, from Warhol to Philip Taaffe. One unusual thing happening in this show is a weird separation and reversal of scale. I doubt if all of Fudge's silk-screens are the same size, which might account for the phenomenon, but the silk-screened patterns in the six smaller and airier paintings, seem individually larger than they do in the three bigger paintings. This runs counter to the regular experience of smaller painting/reduced scale, like a Chardin still-life. The result being that the small paintings look enlarged, like a close-up look, or a view through a microscope, which like Fudge's small paintings, would also be the uncommon equivalent of small painting/large scale. So, my point is that the smaller paintings feel big and are grand in gesture, and that is a quality usually reserved for bigger paintings. Whereas Fudge's three big paintings here are more hazy and atmospheric, their colors blending and breaking in the cascade of repeated overlay. Their scale is more vague, like the view from an airplane; is my airplane now one mile or three miles above Manhattan? Another interesting effect going on here has to do with hardness. Any time an artist works on a stiff support like a wood panel, any mark made is immediately more graphic than it would be on softer, more forgiving materials like canvas or paper. Enamel too has properties of hardness. Jackson Pollock chose enamel because it could flash a fast, long, thin, fine line like liquid metal. These two materials come together in Carl Fudge's work to form a superhard surface, tough like Formica. The reflections of the gallery's spotlights on the large paintings are fixed and reflected intact, just like a counter top. This lends the paintings an indifferent air, making the painting less sensual, maybe less erotic. This show is impressive. Carl Fudge has a method of information shredding and recombination that enables him to make paintings that have an original look, and take giant steps past the trappings of conventional abstract painting. He's created an open system of working that move his content past any tired considerations of painting as some kind of vocabulary grab-bag. And he can make a great painting such as Hysterical Dissemination out of the three primaries that's unlike anything you have seen before. Lauren Wittels Gallery, Oct. 11-Nov. 9, 1996, 48 Greene St., New York, NY 10012. Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art. Back to Reviews 1996 Archives