“I'm exaggerating and personifying some of their extreme emotional vicissitudes [...] It’s the idea of Cubism —but rather than seeing and depicting this coffee cup, say, from four different angles simultaneously, I’m seeing a personality from multiple angles at once. Instead of space being my subject, I’m painting all of someone’s emotional potentialities at once, and that’s what I’d call Psychological Cubism.”
—George Condo
Highly individuated and immediately recognisable, George Condo’s singular approach to painting has marked him out as an artist of remarkable vision, one which seems especially attuned to the historical mode of portraiture and its role at the turn of the century. As critic and author Will Self memorably noted, ‘Condo’s portraiture has packed into its dense layering all this archaeology of the recent past’, combining both the ‘mechanised torture’ that industrialisation inflicted upon the body with a sense of psychological fracturing and simultaneity that became especially acute in the closing decades of the 20th century.i
Executed in 2000, as the artist was refining his signature mode of ‘artificial realism’, allowing him to represent reality as a man-made construct, the present work features one of the compellingly familiar and yet strange tragi-comic characters that continue to populate his sublimely surreal pictorial spaces. With characteristic bulging eyes, large, rounded ears and overbite, the figure belongs to the particular breed of ‘Antipodal Beings’ that first appeared in Condo’s canvases in the mid-1990s – figures which occupy the furthest, darkest reaches of our emotional selves.
In the same vein as masters such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals, Condo has placed his figure against a neutral background here, one which reacts differently to the light and dark sides of the distorted face at the centre. In this effect, Condo frames his portraits to ‘classicize the constellation of human psychology’, but the sentiments in his figures appear more fractured compared to those of his forefathers.ii Like the present work, it was the portraits of these ‘mental states’ that leant their name to Condo’s major 2011 touring retrospective, where the faces of these imaginary characters manifested internal, conflicting emotions and psychological states – imaginatively extending the pictorial experiments of early 20th century Analytical Cubism into the more complex terrain emotional and psychological perception. Executed in gestural, broad brushstrokes, the central figure in the present work exudes a sense of joyfulness, despair, embarrassment, with a base note of insanity; an overall demeanour which is at ‘once endearing yet monstruous.’iii
Receiving both critical and institutional recognition over the years, George Condo represented the United States at La Biennale di Venezia in both 2013 and 2019. His work can be found in permanent collections such as the Musée National d’Art Modern, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others.
