Catch The Ligth//

Fvckrender / “Catch the Light” at W1 Curates, London / Presented by ATRBUTE Beguiling and bedazzling, Fvckrender’s art is the shiny object of desire that catches the eye, seduces the senses and calms the mind. His is the aesthetic anodyne for our age of anxiety, the distraction we might focus on, a fiction better than truth, the visual enigma at the heart of life’s riddle. Emerging out of a life of confusion, of deep anxieties, crippling panic attacks and ongoing depression, Fvckrender admits that he makes his art to feel better, and it’s something that works for him, a way to get past the trauma of the past and the uncertainty of the future by feeling in the present. Produced then as a kind of personal therapy, the spirit of this transformative power is intrinsic to the work itself, bound up in its creative DNA such that it seemingly effects the audience as it does artist, attaining a level of continued success that goes beyond the usual metrics of market or popularity into the phenomenon of collective recognition. Fvckrender’s individual achievements as an artist are appurtenant and ancillary to the overall structure of production and dissemination that sustains his work. No doubt he’s a star, and a pretty dazzling one at that, but as he will quickly tell you, he is but one in a galaxy. Much like many movements that arise out of youth culture and vernacular expression, the digital realm that engenders and eventually exports an artist like this is, far beyond its dimensions as a marketplace, a social space defined by community. We all love and reward the solitary genius, but culture is forged and expressed by clusters and convergences, what we might call a movement or a zeitgeist, and in this way the importance of Fvckrender must be understood as something distinct from how very well his work sells in the market for digital art created by the blockchain. It has something to do with the size of his fan-base, and even more to do with how his imagery and sensibility resonates with the rest of his generation, but its vitality and potency is really about how his art is part of an ongoing conversation that has been going on in a more marginal space outside the mainstream. We often hear him compared now to the rise of low brow art, of skate culture, of graffiti and street art, but the affinity is not one of style it is one of attitude, of the uncommon common ways in which kids figure out their own language as part of figuring themselves out and then invent new DIY ways of broadcasting that language. Fvckrender, who conceives this exhibition as an immersive audio-visual experience (in collaboration with music composer The Holy), understands art’s power as a contemplative focal point. For his installation “Catch the Light” at W1 Curates - his first solo exhibition outside of his native Canada - the contemplative nature of his imagery will unfold across the sweeping all-encompassing LED screens of W1 Curates in London, heightening the mesmeric capacities of a profoundly meditative landscape and soundscape. Coupled with the ambient music to accentuate the energy of the art, Fvckrender’s crystalline, futuristic and hyper-idealized imagery produces here a choreographing of light as it bounds across and bounces off the myriad faces of his virtual objects. This is not the chiaroscuro of old master’s painting, that classic dance of light and dark, but a riotous and radical digital light that defies physics as it deifies nature. Effect and affect at once, Fvckrender’s approach to light is a sensuous celebration of surface and a paean to illumination as that force - mystical, psychological, alchemical and transpersonal. This visual statement brings sight and insight to our pervasive darkness inherent in being. Essay by Carlo McCormick, art critic and writer