The Velvet Gentleman (A Portrait of Erik Satie)_2_3_2 is a digital portrait of the avant-garde composer Eric Satie, part of Nick Fudge’s Picasso Pizazz collection. Erik Satie was famously eccentric, as evidenced by his decision to wear one of seven identical dun-colored suits. The portrait, which uses digital imaging techniques to create a digital banded glitch aesthetic, humorously encapsulates his idiosyncratic, mutable persona, particularly his self-proclaimed Velvet Gentleman persona, his distinctive sartorial choices, and the many personas he adopted throughout his life. The digital portraits not only celebrate Satie's influence on modernist music but also link him to his friends, such as Duchamp and Picasso, who made portrait drawings of Satie and other modernist composers. Similarly, Pharmacie (also from the Picasso Pizazz collection) links Satie to Duchamp and Picasso in an animated mise-en-scene set in Satie's birthplace of Honfleur (where the source photograph for Pharmacie was taken). Fudge’s work extends these connections into a metamodern setting, using digital techniques developed over a long period of time to create his own aesthetic in relation to modern and postmodern aesthetics, and how this might relate to contemporary technological sites and spaces, creating a rich metamodern pattern of entanglements.

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.