Carl Fudge's Dazzle Paintings Reinterpret Naval Camouflage at Ronald Feldman Gallery

Carl Fudge's exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery from February 20 to April 3, 2010 featured unique silkscreen collages on paper grids exploring naval Dazzle camouflage from World War I. The London-born artist, based in New York, sampled and disrupted Edward Wadsworth's 1918 woodcut Liverpool Shipping, a Vorticist work depicting Dazzle-painted ships. Fudge's process involved screen-printed Japanese paper arranged in grids, with works like Plate Layers 1 and Plate Layers 2 playing with scalpel edges between sheets. His approach connects to contemporary investigations of printmaking and handmade serialism, seen in shows by James Siena and Thomas Nozkowski. Dazzle camouflage used jagged, high-contrast shapes to frustrate enemy periscopes, representing a utilitarian aspect of abstraction's origins. Fudge's earlier work engaged with digital processing, manga porn imagery, and Warhol's Rorschach and Camouflage paintings, maintaining a handmade quality through layered silkscreen techniques. The exhibition was located at 31 Mercer Street in SoHo, New York City.