Future Paint: Nick Fudge, Charley Peters and KOMPLY

Opening Reception & Artist Talk

Event: Thursday, April 11 @ 6–8 pm

Location: Kelly-McKenna Gallery, 1308 Third Avenue, Spring Lake, NJ

Event Overview: 

Kelly-McKenna Gallery is pleased to invite you to the Opening Reception & Artist Talk for our upcoming guest-curated exhibition Future Paint: Nick Fudge, Charley Peters, and KOMPLY on Thursday, April 11 from 6-8 pm. 

Artists Nick Fudge, Charley Peters and KOMPLY will be in attendance to answer audience questions and delve deeper in the concepts explored within the show. 

About the Exhibition:

In Future Paint: Nick Fudge, Charley Peters and Komply, British artists Nick Fudge, Charley Peters, and KOMPLY explore the dynamic interplay between art and technology, pushing the boundaries of contemporary painting. With meticulous craftsmanship, each artist honors the legacy of traditional techniques while embracing the exciting possibilities of technology's transformative power.

About the Artists:

Nick Fudge

Nick Fudge's art traverses the complex intersections of postmodernism, metamodernism, and the contemporary landscape shaped by AI-generated imagery and computational algorithms. His current painting practice reimagines postmodern tropes of appropriation and quotation from the 1980s, offering a twenty-first century response to the innovative spirit of modernist avant-garde movements. In a recent series, Fudge drew inspiration from Cubist works by Picasso and Braque. Beginning as near-exact replicas, these works undergo a process of recursive transformation, fusing past and future aesthetics. Through intricate geometric patterning, Fudge reflects on the artists' manipulation of space-time, interweaving multiple dimensions into his compositions. He also considers how the complexity of modernist time-space imagery has evolved in the context of AI-driven artistic creation. Through his artistic practice, Fudge aims to cultivate a philosophy of painting that transcends traditional boundaries. He views painting as a dynamic repository of ideas, languages, technologies, and temporal experiences, embodying the richness and complexity of artistic expression across generations.

Charley Peters

Charley Peters makes paintings where abstract language and digital experiences collide. Her work considers our relationship with painting in the contemporary world, seeing it as an expanded practice that is equally physical and virtual and not always limited to the surface of the canvas. Although essentially involved with the nature of the abstract, Peters’ paintings remind us of aspects of our real world, plotting a transition in our ways of seeing from the once-radical non-representation of high modernism to our current saturated vision of images experienced each day on screens through the internet, video games and creative technologies. In Future Paint Peters is showing works from a series of paintings that have been developed through her conversations with AI about constructing a new form of abstract painting for today. The works combine the digital ‘imagination’ of the AI with the thoughts and material processes of the artist to create paintings seen through the lens of posthuman experience but embedded in the traditions of the studio. 

KOMPLY

KOMPLY is an artist making paintings on canvas and on walls in public spaces. He explores the legacy of eastern European Constructivism in relation to our contemporary lived experiences of Western life in the context of accelerating technological advances and mass communication. Interested in the use of computation to navigate intelligence, generate tactical strategies and control knowledge, KOMPLY has made a series of paintings on canvas for Future Paint in a muted palette reminiscent of military camouflage punctuated with hard edged geometric forms as ‘instructive text’. He cites the work of computer scientist Arthur Samuels as a source of inspiration for this work, fascinated by Samuel’s early developments in machine learning that led to him creating a self-learning AI program to play Checkers in 1959. KOMPLY’s work makes connections between the seemingly innocuous world of gaming, artificial intelligence and the real-world use of technology by the military.