Breakout (A Portrait of Duchamp), a part of the Picasso Pizazz collection by Nick Fudge, is a humorous decoding of Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic and skeptical 1959 Self-Portrait in Profile. Fudge constructs a playful, gamified version of the self-portrait using the digitized bricks of the 1970s video arcade game Breakout to create a negative virtual space that mimics the analog cast shadow that Duchamp used to create his own self-image. This digital work plays with Duchamp's ironic use of negative space, using the game's disappearing bricks to metaphorically represent Duchamp and his approach to art, authorship, and its limitations. The work draws humorous parallels between the infra-slim of physical and metaphysical space that Duchamp explored throughout his work. Fudge uses digital technologies to explore the intersections of art, humor, and technology, creating a metamodern take on the concept of breaking through boundaries, such as traditional artistic boundaries to achieve new forms of expression and understanding. The digitized irony in Fudge's Breakout portrait echoes the theme of digital technological advances and metamodern breakthroughs—spatial and conceptual—within the wider Picasso Pizazz collection.
In Picasso Pizazz collection, the contexts of modernism and postmodernism are introduced through the genre of portraiture, weaving them into our current metamodern discourse on the art of the past in relation to a seemingly technologically determined future. This approach serves to recontextualize the impact of machines on modernist art and values. The collection focuses on two of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Picasso and Duchamp, who had markedly different responses to the machine. The collection not only revisits the motifs and stylistic innovations of its subjects but also integrates modern digital techniques to reimagine their legacies in the context of today's technological advancements. Dive deeper into Picasso Pizazz and Nick Fudge's artistic practice with our exclusive interview.
