George Condo’s Black Standing Figures engulfs the viewer: stretching over two metres wide and nearly life-sized in height, this large-scale painting is like a wall filled with frenetic graffiti. Painted in 2000, this work appears largely black and white from a distance, yet there is an immense variety of texture and an impressive range of colour on closer inspection, as the scrawled figures reveal themselves to have been rendered using a wide variety of techniques. This palimpsest-like composition recalls the energy of the paintings of Condo’s friends and fellow artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, whom he knew during his years in New York in the 1980s. At the same time, it pays tribute to Brassaï’s celebrated photographs of the street art incised in the walls of mid-twentieth-century Paris. Condo’s ability to cannibalise a range of artistic and conceptual influences, transforming them into something new, is a hallmark of his work.
An incredibly erudite artist, Condo abandoned the New York of Haring and Basquiat, instead choosing to spend a number of years in Paris, immersed in the wealth of the European canon and tradition of visual culture. These he absorbed, eventually processing them and imbuing them with the new, vigorous energy that is so apparent in Black Standing Figures. Condo has depicted these massed figures with a manic edge that is heightened by the fragmentary, elusive appearance of the people themselves: here, a hand is glimpsed, there, hair, elsewhere, breasts, all coalescing to give the impression of a crowd facing us. Condo depicts this crowd with disjointed and distorted features in a manner that recalls his now-iconic ‘pods,’ or ‘antipodal beings’, a notion taken from Aldous Huxley’s work Heaven and Hell. There, Huxley discussed the ability to access the ‘antipodes’, areas of the mind reached through meditation or hallucinogens. Certainly, looking at Black Standing Figures, there is a clear sense of hallucinatory power to the image. Condo has introduced a new, raw mentality to the work, continuing the distortions of the ‘psychological Cubism’ he has explored in other paintings.
Stylistically, Black Standing Figures appears to compress a range of influences. As well as the graffiti of Haring or the paintings of Matta, there is a clear tribute to Pablo Picasso, and in particular to the works of the post-war period when he was in a relationship with fellow artist Françoise Gilot. There is a resemblance in the strong use of lines to carve up and cover the space of the canvas that relates to Picasso’s 1948 painting, La cuisine (Museum of Modern Art, New York). That work in itself was inspired by an earlier proposal for a sculpture to be created as a monument to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The figures in Condo’s work also recall the depictions of Françoise herself, for instance the Femme-Fleur depictions showing her as a flower. Condo has taken a similar transformative process as Picasso’s, yet has given it a new spin. This picture has a deliberately sinister edge that has little to do, in terms of atmosphere, with the fauns and satyrs that Picasso painted in a similar style in Antibes in the post-war years. Instead, there is the sense that these characters have sprung fully-formed from the darker recesses of the mind.
Discussing his own work, Condo has said: ‘I like to think about Picasso… because he took a bicycle seat and a pair of handlebars and made a bull’s head: he reconfigured a manmade thing into a natural thing. What I’ve done is the reverse: I’ve turned it back into the bicycle’ (Condo, quoted in S. Baker, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 47). Condo has created something that is emphatically manmade. Not only that, its surface insists upon the viewer’s awareness of the impressive variety of techniques that have been employed to harness the image. There is a clear focus on the notion of image-making itself. In some of Condo’s paintings, the focus is on a lone figure or small group, often referencing the Old Masters. Black Standing Figures forms part of another approach that he has taken in a number of works, which feature an all-over composition. This was a process that Condo began in another work, Diaries of Milan of 1984, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Over the years, he has sometimes returned to this process, filling the entirety of the canvas with a figurative composition that essentially becomes a pattern through its rhythm and regularity, harnessing an energy akin to that of Action Painting while remaining anchored to the image of the crowd. In Black Standing Figures, Condo has thus achieved abstract ends through figurative ends.