'You’re seduced by the willing eye and then stared at by the aggressive one. As you move into the portrait there is something paranoiac about each part.' – George Condo (Existential Portraits: Sculpture, Drawings, Paintings 2005/2006, Holzwarth Publications, 2006, p.10)

There is more that meets the fervent eye of George Condo’s Smiling Smoker. A quintessential work from Condo’s seminal series, Mental States, the present lot is a prime reading of Condo’s own artistic manifesto in its representation of the precariousness of human existence. Condo, humoured in his portraits, reveals the simple psychosis of everyday life. Playing upon exaggerated emotion, Condo’s imagined sitters 'are questioning their existence. Faced with despair, they decide to live way out there beyond the periphery of consciousness.' (Ibid, p.7)

Working entirely from memory without the aid of photographic source material, Condo’s portraits are entirely autonomous snapshots of a moment captured within chaos. By breaking down one reality to construct another – more manic – version, Condo himself describes his process as transcribing a mental phenomenon (Ibid, p.11). Condo’s exaggerated and frenzied characters reflect the varying roles that each person plays in their daily lives, ultimately posing the question: Can anyone ever really be themselves? Set against a nondescript black background, Condo’s half-nude woman is turned away yet catches the gaze of the viewer in an isolated moment, smoke trailing from her cigarette. Recalling Edward Hopper’s pictures of the detached and melancholic views of American life, Condo, rendering his own unique composition and gaze, turns his canvases into a mirror for the spectators themselves. This study of the facades of human existence within contemporary society underpins Condo’s Artificial Realism – a term coined by the artist in the eighties to describe 'the realistic representation of that which is artificial.' (Ibid, p.8)

Thus, beneath Condo’s humourous and exuberant execution is the underlying idea of 'the self' and how human existence seeks to escape it. As Condo describes, '[the portraits] are able to reflect the emotional range of a human being. They can embody the despair, the heartache, the love and the happiness of any of us. They’re capable of all those things.' (Ibid, p. 13)