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Lot Essay
‘Monsters are just as beautiful as maidens’ — G. Condo
‘In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person... now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture’ — G. Condo
An array of amorphous visages, all toothy grins and cartoonish eyes, materialise from a tangled mass of lines; breasts, buttocks and occasional fluttering bow-ties are shaded forth into three dimensions, besieged by sinuous abstraction and almost swallowed by a rich, red background. In George Condo’s The Age of Reason (2010), any rational sense of order indicated by the title seems well out of the picture. Curiously reminiscent of a classical bathing scene or the planar forms of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), this feverish vision is a stunning display of the kaleidoscopic dialogues with art history that characterise Condo’s oeuvre; cues are also taken from Willem de Kooning, Disney cartoons and the graffiti-informed work of Condo’s close friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The whole is held together, however, by a technical and compositional virtuosity that is entirely Condo’s own. Working from a principle that he calls ‘Psychological Cubism,’ his figures, outlandish as they are, resonate with the nebulous experiences of selfhood with which we can all identify. In The Age of Reason, there is method to the madness.
The work’s title gestures to Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 existential novel The Age of Reason, which deals with Sartre’s conception of what it means to be free, and how to operate on these principles within the framework of society. The unstable, orgiastic animation of Condo’s work pushes the boundaries of such containment, but is restrained from total abandon: whether the faces contort with pain or pleasure in response is left unclear. ‘Picasso,’ he says, ‘takes what’s neat and pretty and clean and he turns it into what it really is, like an ugly monster’ (G. Condo, quoted in Emily Nathan, ‘artnet Asks: George Condo Sees Faces and Screaming Heads Everywhere,’ artnet news, 14 October 2015). Condo’s unique psycho-social lens upon our existence does something similar: for all its near-abstraction, the many-headed hydra of emotional potentialities in The Age of Reason exhibits a form of disconcerting truth.
From 2009 to 2010, Condo created large works known as Figure Compositions. Moving from his signature portraiture to a wider consideration of the role of abstraction in his work, he packed the picture plane with bodies, lines and abstract fields. ‘In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person,’ he has said; ‘now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture’ (G. Condo quoted in L. Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’ in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p.24). The idea of architectural (de)construction reflects Condo’s concerns with how we build our own self-images, and how we situate ourselves in relation to others and the world around us. The grimacing personalities in The Age of Reason are absorbed in their abstract surroundings even as their forms are delineated, as Laura Hoptman writes. ‘Realistic details … struggle to emerge from the rich atmosphere of line and Cézannesque passage that comprise the backgrounds. It is as if this painterly primordial soup is tugging these figurative forms back into itself, impeding their complete transformation from shapes into images’ (L. Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’ in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p.23). Her allusion to Cézanne is apt: the great post-Impressionist’s passage technique, the blending of overlapping planes into one another, finds a clear cognate in Condo’s scintillating composition. It is as if Condo has brought a faceted Cézanne landscape into quivering life. Indeed, as Condo himself has said, ‘[s]ometimes, there’s no difference in my paintings between what can happen to a woman, an object, a landscape, or an abstraction. A face could be treated like a very abstract passage in a landscape’ (G. Condo, quoted in A. Bonney, ‘George Condo by Annie Bonney,’ BOMB 40, Summer 1992).
‘In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person... now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture’ — G. Condo
An array of amorphous visages, all toothy grins and cartoonish eyes, materialise from a tangled mass of lines; breasts, buttocks and occasional fluttering bow-ties are shaded forth into three dimensions, besieged by sinuous abstraction and almost swallowed by a rich, red background. In George Condo’s The Age of Reason (2010), any rational sense of order indicated by the title seems well out of the picture. Curiously reminiscent of a classical bathing scene or the planar forms of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), this feverish vision is a stunning display of the kaleidoscopic dialogues with art history that characterise Condo’s oeuvre; cues are also taken from Willem de Kooning, Disney cartoons and the graffiti-informed work of Condo’s close friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The whole is held together, however, by a technical and compositional virtuosity that is entirely Condo’s own. Working from a principle that he calls ‘Psychological Cubism,’ his figures, outlandish as they are, resonate with the nebulous experiences of selfhood with which we can all identify. In The Age of Reason, there is method to the madness.
The work’s title gestures to Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 existential novel The Age of Reason, which deals with Sartre’s conception of what it means to be free, and how to operate on these principles within the framework of society. The unstable, orgiastic animation of Condo’s work pushes the boundaries of such containment, but is restrained from total abandon: whether the faces contort with pain or pleasure in response is left unclear. ‘Picasso,’ he says, ‘takes what’s neat and pretty and clean and he turns it into what it really is, like an ugly monster’ (G. Condo, quoted in Emily Nathan, ‘artnet Asks: George Condo Sees Faces and Screaming Heads Everywhere,’ artnet news, 14 October 2015). Condo’s unique psycho-social lens upon our existence does something similar: for all its near-abstraction, the many-headed hydra of emotional potentialities in The Age of Reason exhibits a form of disconcerting truth.
From 2009 to 2010, Condo created large works known as Figure Compositions. Moving from his signature portraiture to a wider consideration of the role of abstraction in his work, he packed the picture plane with bodies, lines and abstract fields. ‘In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person,’ he has said; ‘now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture’ (G. Condo quoted in L. Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’ in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p.24). The idea of architectural (de)construction reflects Condo’s concerns with how we build our own self-images, and how we situate ourselves in relation to others and the world around us. The grimacing personalities in The Age of Reason are absorbed in their abstract surroundings even as their forms are delineated, as Laura Hoptman writes. ‘Realistic details … struggle to emerge from the rich atmosphere of line and Cézannesque passage that comprise the backgrounds. It is as if this painterly primordial soup is tugging these figurative forms back into itself, impeding their complete transformation from shapes into images’ (L. Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’ in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p.23). Her allusion to Cézanne is apt: the great post-Impressionist’s passage technique, the blending of overlapping planes into one another, finds a clear cognate in Condo’s scintillating composition. It is as if Condo has brought a faceted Cézanne landscape into quivering life. Indeed, as Condo himself has said, ‘[s]ometimes, there’s no difference in my paintings between what can happen to a woman, an object, a landscape, or an abstraction. A face could be treated like a very abstract passage in a landscape’ (G. Condo, quoted in A. Bonney, ‘George Condo by Annie Bonney,’ BOMB 40, Summer 1992).