Condo or the inverted form of abstract art
About the retrospective exhibition "Humanoids" devoted to George Condo at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco until 1 October 2023.
He is said to be a master in the art of depicting the depths of the human psyche. George Condo, born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, is the subject of a retrospective entitled "Humanoids", on view until 1 October 2023 at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (Villa Paloma). According to the American painter, well known for his portraits, "the Humanoid is not a science-fiction monster, it is a form of representation that uses traditional means to bring deep emotions to the surface of a person". The mimetic ideal that prevailed in ancient painting gave rise to countless representations that were "similar" and "comparable" to humans. However, only a handful of effigies have reached the stage of being "humanoid" or "golem" on the verge of coming to life. Rembrandt's portraits are among them. But take a look around the art galleries: not all the works of art for sale are humanoid.
What about modern painting, for which the 'truth' of the medium has supplanted a realistic project that the invention of photography had rendered obsolete? As there was no longer any purely pragmatic need to pose for hours and pay a fortune to offer one's portrait to posterity, only abstraction seemed for a time to be able to prolong pictorial creation and achieve the status of a work of art for sale. George Condo took up the challenge and turned modern painting towards the 'almost human'. He took the problem back to its source: by seizing Cubism, he reversed its intentions. He humanised it. He became the proponent of a "psychological cubism", seeking to see in the deformations of Picasso and Braque not the advent of "pure painting", but a realistic exploration of the human psyche. In so doing, Condo followed in the footsteps of the art critic Fénéon, who, visiting Picasso's studio at the time of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, advised the young artist to devote himself to caricature.
Condo continued in this vein, placing Cubist distortion on the same level as that of the caricaturists: a singular way of reinventing Figuration. Divided into six chapters, the Monaco exhibition traces the continuity of Condo's prolific oeuvre, which ranges from 'aliens' to society directories, from Guido Reni to Bugs Bunny. Punctuated by specially commissioned paintings, the exhibition opens the doors to Humanoïdes' mad and erudite factory. "Of course," writes Philippe Ducat in the June issue of the contemporary art magazine Artpress, "the interest of Condo's art is not limited to painting the expression of people's inner feelings. His formal mastery of materials, colours and drawing propels his paintings into the realm of high art. Through references to the masters of art history, Condo not only tells stories of paintings that have come to be, but he participates in the very history of painting - like Picasso in relation to the great masters, and with the same communicative jubilation".
Picasso, the tutelary figure... It was in fact the reproduction in a Boston newspaper of a painting by the Spanish painter that prompted student George Condo to enrol at the University of Massachusetts Lowel in art history, while studying music at the same time. And it was on the advice of Jean-Michel Basquiat that the young American decided to move to New York to launch his career as an artist. At the same time as discovering the composers of his time, such as John Cage, Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Cordo began working at the Factory in the 1980s with Andy Warhol, who had appreciated his paintings exhibited in an East Village art gallery that he had visited with Keith Haring. Condo took from this episode in his life that you can access the whole of art history... and turn it into material by combining it as you please.
George Condo's work is ultimately based on his ability to use art-historical reference points such as Picasso, Cézanne and Glenn Brown to introduce allusions to contemporary American culture and the archetypes associated with it. In his own words, the portraits he creates are representations of the different psychological states we are confronted with on a daily basis. "Expressions of grief, horror, joy, happiness, love and hate can all be captured at the same time in a single portrait, because I give myself the freedom to express my own emotions through another person's face," he explains. These imaginary portraits are the result of a meeting between the quirks of his mind and the classical aesthetic of the works he revisits. George Condo came up with the concept of "artificial realism", which manifested itself as "the realistic representation of the artificial" and produced caricatures whose level of humour was hard to match.
When the young George Condot moved to Paris after the Factory experience (he eventually spent ten years in Europe before returning to New York for good), he made his hotel room his studio, and assiduously frequented the Louvre, fascinated by the copyists. It was with one of them that he made a copy of a painting by Raphael, suddenly discovering techniques that he had never known existed. "It was then that the idea of pictorial reconstruction occurred to him, something that Picasso or Cézanne did not do, since on the contrary they deconstructed their environment", explains Philippe Ducat in Artpress, a graphic artist specialising in art books, publisher and collector of collections. "Hence abstraction became realism and what he called psychological cubism, in which he painted portraits of imaginary characters who expressed a whole range of feelings through the multiple expressions given to their faces". Portraits, certainly, and therefore realistic. But they have no reality, so they are ultimately abstract. "In the same way as a painting by Frank Stella or Brice Marden, it makes no reference to reality," insists Philippe Ducat. For him, the cinematic genre to which Condo's art could be likened would be that of Monty Python, William Hogarth or Terry Gilliam, "with the same taste for farce, pastiche and exaggeration, but also for the tragic (Bandit, Bandit, 1981)". At first glance, Condo's paintings are indeed laugh-out-loud funny, "but then we laugh yellow because they turn out to be deeply distressing, conveying a vision of humanity that is, in the final analysis, not very amusing".
Illustration : George Condo - Rodrigo’s wife, 2011
Huile sur lin
137,5 x 122,6 cm
Collection privée
© 2023 George Condo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.