What Fvckrender builds around him

In this interview, our editor Nina Knaack speaks with Fvckrender on growing up in Magog, ten years in hospitality, building Foil and finding his way back to his own visual language.

Before I ask Frédéric Duquette my first question, he gives me a small warning: “I will probably be doing several things while we speak. Please don’t take this personally.” He is a compulsive multitasker, he explains, and calls are no exception; sometimes people assume that his attention has drifted elsewhere, while for him, keeping several things moving at once can actually make it easier to concentrate.

It is an apt introduction to Duquette, better known as Fvckrender, whose life as an artist has been shaped by a similar instinct to keep moving. He grew up in Magog, a small town in Quebec, wanted to become an artist from an early age and experimented with drawing, painting, photography and clothing before finding the medium that would eventually become his own. He left school young, spent more than a decade working in restaurants and bars, and later taught himself 3D while working in Montreal, often using the hours around his shifts to practise. After a bicycle accident disrupted his physical life, that practice became daily, giving him both structure and, eventually, the distinctive visual language of metallic flowers, chains, crystalline forms, vast landscapes and carefully manipulated light for which Fvckrender became known.

Much of that history has already been told. What interested me more was everything sitting around it: the child who copied an American Apparel cardigan and sold his own versions at school, the waiter who still considers hospitality one of the best forms of education, the artist who began wondering whether his own name and visual language belonged inside the established art world, and the person who recently put much of his savings into a place where people can drink coffee, listen to music, look at art and, ideally, speak to one another.

So we started in Magog.

Growing up

NK: "When you picture Magog as it was when you were growing up, what is the first place that comes back to you?"

FD: "Definitely the lake. Magog is, and I know this is going to sound very grotesque, kind of the Monaco of Canada. There’s a lake that goes from Canada to the US and a beautiful mountain around it, so you have boats, very nice boats, and a ski station. It’s a really interesting place, and when I think about growing up there, the lake is the first thing I see."

NK: "And how do you remember your childhood there?"

FD: "I had a very interesting childhood because I lost my mom when I was ten, and my dad wasn’t the most present dad there was, so I had a lot of freedom. I was skateboarding all the time, and I could stay up until four in the morning without much repercussion, apart from what it eventually did to my school grades. I had to take care of myself quite a lot, although my aunt and my sister also took care of me. My dad is a very nice person, a very good person, and he was also a party animal, so sometimes he would arrive home at three in the morning a little tipsy or drunk. When I talk about it, I sometimes realise how it can sound, although I understood his side quite early as well. I think I was mature enough, even then, to understand where he was coming from."

Before 3D entered his life, there were already signs of the impulse to make things. One of the more obscure details I had come across while reading old interviews was that Duquette had made and altered clothes as a teenager, which turned out to involve a small operation bringing Montreal fashion back to Magog.

NK: "You were already making clothes before you started working with 3D. What did those pieces actually look like?"

FD: "I’m from a small town, and Montreal was the closest city. At the time, Urban Outfitters and American Apparel were becoming really popular there, and those trends hadn’t reached my hometown yet. I was lucky because I went to Montreal to skateboard all the time, so I would see what people were wearing there and then bring those ideas back with me. I made tie-dye pieces, and I remember there was this American Apparel cardigan that everyone wanted, so I bought one in Montreal, completely took it apart and made a pattern from it. Then I recreated it with fabrics I could find in my hometown and sold the cardigans to people at my high school."

NK: "Do you remember already having that need to create at that age? Was there a sense that this was something you wanted to pursue?"

FD: "Very young, actually. I think from ten or eleven years old I always wanted to be an artist, I just had no idea what my medium was going to be. I tried painting, drawing, sewing, photography; I literally tried everything, and there was never one thing that truly connected. Eventually I put the idea on the back burner and thought, ‘Okay, I’m probably never going to be an artist, I’m just not talented enough.’ Later I realised that I simply hadn’t spent enough time learning. Throughout my childhood I had this feeling that art was where I belonged. I don’t really want to call it a calling, because it didn’t feel like that, it was simply this sense that this was where I should be. It was only around 23 or 24 that I really started making art and pushing myself to learn every day."

There are other small fragments of Duquette’s childhood scattered through earlier interviews. Considering how futuristic his work would eventually appear, I was interested in whether the future itself had once occupied a similar place in his imagination.

NK: "I found an interview where you mentioned watching the stars with your father, and another where you talked about going to Star Wars premieres with your brother. What did the idea of the future mean to you when you were young?"

FD: "I think the future was actually quite pessimistic for me when I was younger, quite scary. I had a lot of anxiety and panic attacks, and there was a period when I didn’t even really think I would survive my twenties because of how intense that could become. Now I see the future extremely optimistically. Even when I’m going through very hard periods, I somehow stay hopeful and confident about what is ahead. When I was younger, though, there was always that question of what was bigger. I would look up and wonder what else was there."

Finding another route

Duquette’s relationship with formal education was difficult early on. He has spoken before about leaving school without a diploma and later finding the doors to formal 3D education closed to him, although the experience of school itself appears to have established that distance much earlier.

NK: "Do you think formal education already gave you the feeling that the conventional route probably wasn’t going to be yours?"

FD: "When I started high school, I was immediately put into a separate class with students who had disabilities and different learning needs, which meant I was separated from all of my friends right from the beginning. Kids can be very mean, and I basically lost all my friends because suddenly I was the kid in ‘the other class’. From my first days of high school, that set the tone for me that this probably wasn’t going to be my place, and within the first month I already knew I didn’t see my future coming through school. At the same time, I think I would have chosen a different road by nature anyway. I always felt different from everyone else in my school."

That different road eventually passed through restaurants and bars, where Duquette worked for around a decade. In most accounts of his career, these jobs form the backdrop to the more familiar story of him learning Cinema 4D between shifts. When we speak, he remembers the restaurants as an education in their own right.

NK: "You worked in hospitality for at least ten years, which tends to appear in your biography as the period before art became your profession. When you look back now, what did all those years in restaurants actually teach you?"

FD: "At one point I genuinely thought that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life because I had no education, and what’s strange is that I had been super ambitious as a child, then when I started working in restaurants I stopped being ambitious career-wise. I still had ambition in other areas, and then when I discovered 3D I suddenly saw the potential I had, which made me ambitious again. Hospitality itself taught me an enormous amount about how to deal with people, how to stop taking everything personally, how to manage stress and how to handle whatever is happening around you. I think everyone should work as a waiter for at least one year of their life. It’s honestly the best school."

Making a place where people stay

Years after leaving hospitality, Duquette has found himself involved with it again, this time alongside his fiancée, artist Jo-Anie Charland. Together they founded Foil in Montreal, a space that brings digital and physical art into conversation with coffee, sound, events and other forms of programming. Its origins can be traced partly to something much more specific: Duquette’s frustration at seeing digital work presented poorly, even within some of the art world’s most established institutions.

NK: "Before we get to Foil, I’m curious whether you recognise anything from restaurant culture in the way you work today. You once had several people working in your studio; what does that setup look like now?"

FD: "It’s actually just me now. I used to have more people, and it became expensive, but I also realised that I could do most of the work myself. Strangely, the period when I had the most employees was sometimes the period when we got the least done because everybody was working on something and getting anything completely finished could become nearly impossible. I tend to move faster than most people, and that has been a problem at times because people working with me wouldn’t always understand that pace, so right now Fvckrender is just me again."

NK: "Foil seems to move in another direction because it is so centred on bringing people together. How did the combination of exhibitions, coffee, music and events actually develop?"

FD: "It gradually built itself. We had shown work in so many different galleries, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and sometimes we would see digital art shown on a screen with cables hanging underneath it, which would drive me completely nuts. Even at Christie’s, I would see my work presented that way and feel like the medium wasn’t being given enough attention. We wanted to find a way of presenting digital art elegantly, where everything around the artwork also felt considered, and that’s why we built a wall where all of the technology is integrated. It was extremely expensive to do, although completely worth it, and then we created a room with the big projector as well."

"For me, a really important part of being an artist is being adaptive. I don’t want my future to depend entirely on what I happen to be doing right now; I want it to depend on my ability to evolve. Foil comes from that same way of thinking. The question is always: how can we evolve, how can we keep making cool shit without compromising the vision? You have to keep looking at what is happening around you, adapting to different situations and finding a way to create something that feels different."

NK: "And somewhere along the way, the coffee shop became part of that."

FD: "Exactly, because we wanted people to sit down and actually spend time with the artwork. Going to an art gallery tends to be something you decide to do as an event, whereas everyone goes to get a coffee every day, so for us it made sense to bring those things together. Getting coffee is already this little moment in your day where you can sit down and chill, and here that moment can also become a time when you look at an artwork or start a conversation."

"The way we built the space is very fluid. In a lot of coffee shops people remain quite individual, whereas here people walk around, speak to one another, talk about the art, the coffee or simply the space itself. What is really important to us is figuring out how you build something that makes people connect with each other, because people don’t talk to one another enough anymore."

NK: "You also organise music and audiovisual events, and you even mentioned a journaling session that was coming up. How do you describe Foil yourselves?"

FD: "We call it more of a curated spot. The idea is to curate experiences that people can enjoy and to bring in anything that has a relationship with art. We have cars, sound, audiovisual work, writing and all these other different media that people can encounter in the same place. The goal is really to make something different, and the main vision behind the whole place is actually very simple: we want humans to reconnect with art."

Finding Fvckrender again

The name Fvckrender once began as a private joke but eventually appeared within auction houses and established galleries that Duquette had never imagined entering when he chose it.

NK: "The name Fvckrender originally came from the frustration of waiting for things to render. What did that identity give you at the beginning?"

FD: "Initially I never intended to work in this space at all. I genuinely never thought I would get more than a hundred followers, so when I created the Instagram account it was purely for fun. It wasn’t even really about posting my art; it was a place where I could keep myself accountable and make sure I created something every day, and then it started gaining traction. The name really did come from how frustrating rendering used to be, although now a render can take one second, so in that sense my name is completely irrelevant."

NK: "Has the distinction between Frédéric and Fvckrender changed as the career became bigger?"

FD: "I think I got a little bit lost in the early 2020s, because I entered the auction-house market and started working with more traditional galleries, and I began to feel like my style didn’t really fit there, my name didn’t fit there, maybe everything about it didn’t fit there. There was a period where I genuinely lost my connection with my own visual language and my own identity because I was trying to fit somewhere that wasn’t truly me."

"It’s actually only very recently, maybe two or three months ago, that I reconnected with myself and started letting go of those boundaries. For a few years I was shaping the work around this strange mould, thinking about where it could belong and whether certain people would like it, and now I’m much more comfortable with the possibility that they might or they might not. If the work fits somewhere, it fits, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. For a long time I was trying to shape my art into something that wasn’t me. Now Fvckrender is back."

NK: "Was there something specific you were finally able to let go of?"

FD: "I think I became much more comfortable with whether people like the work. For a while I would catch myself thinking, ‘Does this gallery like my art? Should I make something that fits there?’ and now I’m much less interested in making decisions that way."

NK: "So where does that leave the relationship between Frédéric and Fvckrender?"

FD: "Right now I’m actually more into Fvckrender than Frédéric. I also realised that my art and my personal taste are very different, like really different. The range of things I like is extremely wide, and the kind of art I might want to put on my own wall can be very different from the kind of art I make, even though I genuinely love what I make."

"Sometimes that becomes a conversation in the work too, because I think about how something can live on a wall and how somebody could actually own it. I want people to own my art; that’s one of the things I find most exciting, although it can become a constant fight because as an artist you also need to live, which means you need to sell and deal with marketing. At the same time, we’re all being fed viral content through Instagram every day, and eventually you start wondering, ‘Should I make viral content?’ There are so many different pressures entering the decision-making process that it can become too much."

NK: "Do you actually have your own work hanging at home?"

FD: "Oh, so much. I love putting my art on display, and I love collecting other people’s work as well. Honestly, I’m my number one fan. If you came to my house, there are probably twenty artworks of mine there. I just love what I do, and I wouldn’t change it."

A good day

Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Duquette a couple of questions that have little to do with an artist biography, but give you a lovely insight of his daily, simple joys.

NK: "What does a good day contain for you?"

FD: "Being with Jo-Anie, my fiancée, is the most important thing. Waking up with Jo-Anie, having a good coffee and playing video games in the morning – that’s a good day."

NK: "What are you playing at the moment?"

FD: "Path of Exile, a lot of Diablo, and I’ve played a lot of StarCraft. Too much StarCraft. I’m a big nerd."

NK: "Another random question: what is the most recent object you bought for yourself?"

FD: "I’ve actually been really calm with buying things because with the gallery I put most of my savings into it, so I don’t spend very much at the moment. Although, wait, I did buy a rice cooker. A sick rice cooker, actually. It’s a Japanese one."

NK: "At least that sounds useful."

FD: "I haven’t used it yet, but it’s been standing on my kitchen counter for three weeks."