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Lot Essay
"I describe what I do as psychological cubism…Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously. Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they're hearing down the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying – I'll put them all in one face"—George Condo
(G. Condo, quoted in S. Jeffries, "George Condo: 'I Was Delirious. Nearly Died,'" The Guardian, February 10, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/10/george-condo).
George Condo’s Mental Landscape is a monumentally scaled example of the artist’s practice, which is informed as much by the great painters of the past as by an intuitive and penetrating understanding of the human condition. Painted with black and white acrylic paint and charcoal on board, Condo’s seemingly depraved scene plays out cinematically over the sprawling ten-foot painting. As if chronicling the aftermath of Bacchanalian revelry, Condo’s characters are variously humorous, sinister and distressed - often a combination of the three. At the far left, a woman, naked except for fishnet stockings and a pair of bunny ears, reaches for the back of a striped armchair on her hands and knees. Curly hair obscures her gnarled face, turned sideways at the viewer. A carnival tent-prison amalgam behind her contains a variety of tortured, abstracted faces that recall Picasso’s subversive cubist portraits of the early 1910s. A pair of motionless feet poking in from the picture’s leftmost edge suggest the vastness of the scene, implying more action just out of view.
The center panel finds a man in the armchair, bottle and cigarette in hand, in three simultaneous states of being. He concurrently stares out at the viewer furiously, down at his smoldering cigarette, or to his left at the second nearly nude woman in the painting. His mangled, incomplete set of bared teeth and his sparse curly hair give him a menacing, confrontational quality. The long-limbed object of one of his multiple fixations, the second woman in the scene, exposes her backside to the viewer while gracefully holding a circular object in her outstretched left hand; a pearl bracelet decorates her wrist, and, along with her long, straight hair, distinguishes her from the other stocking-clad woman. A cracked egg shell rests on the ground, furthering the feeling of witnessing the fallout of an epic, possibly destructive, event.
More strewn trash graces the right-hand panel, with a cocked mousetrap, a broken bottle and a few more eggshells rounding out the lower register. A vertical, midcentury television set stands next to a sinister Bozo the clown-style punching bag, whose snarling face is slashed out by a slap of white paint. Mental Landscape’s clear rightward directionality deposits the viewer’s gaze into the only panel devoid of people; a repository of sorts, the final panel is a fitting destination after traversing the left and center segments.
Condo’s panoramic scene strongly suggests, and maybe even encourages, a narrative reading – but stops just short of revealing it. The three principal players are familiar to one another, but seem to avoid direct interaction or any mutual acknowledgement. The basic contours of the scene are immediately clear, but what are we to make of the group of caged, tortured faces at the painting’s left edge? What is the crawling woman reaching for in, or behind, the central armchair? Where is all this taking place? A master of carefully composed ambiguity, Condo’s best paintings leave viewers probing incomplete truths and searching for scant morsels of visual information.
The human face, perhaps Condo’s most effective visual tool, is both a source of clarity and mystery in the present lot. The myriad faces in Mental Landscape, from the poor souls trapped in the cage to the central figure enjoying a smoke and a drink in his chair, invite a broad range of readings. As is typical of Condo and his “psychological cubism”, the face is less a visual fact than a collection of contradicting emotions and states of mind. Indeed, the painting’s title makes reference to this fact, obliquely introducing the attractive possibility that the whole scene is a metaphor for the painter’s own psyche.
Whether or not this is the case, the present work is nevertheless an example of Condo’s career-long wink-and-nod engagement with predeceasing painters from Velázquez to Picasso. An explicit attempt to describe the human mind and condition with paint, Condo testifies in the open to what other painters were always after but rarely spoke about. Condo’s brazenness and assuredness in rendering the wrinkles and inconsistencies of the human mind distinguish him as a leading contemporary painter, and place him in the ring with other great modern painters-cum-psychoanalysts like Lucian Freud, Max Beckmann and Alice Neel. A heady mixture of surrealism, cubism, genre painting and portraiture, George Condo’s Mental Landscape is a substantial addition to the artist’s prodigious body of work.
(G. Condo, quoted in S. Jeffries, "George Condo: 'I Was Delirious. Nearly Died,'" The Guardian, February 10, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/10/george-condo).
George Condo’s Mental Landscape is a monumentally scaled example of the artist’s practice, which is informed as much by the great painters of the past as by an intuitive and penetrating understanding of the human condition. Painted with black and white acrylic paint and charcoal on board, Condo’s seemingly depraved scene plays out cinematically over the sprawling ten-foot painting. As if chronicling the aftermath of Bacchanalian revelry, Condo’s characters are variously humorous, sinister and distressed - often a combination of the three. At the far left, a woman, naked except for fishnet stockings and a pair of bunny ears, reaches for the back of a striped armchair on her hands and knees. Curly hair obscures her gnarled face, turned sideways at the viewer. A carnival tent-prison amalgam behind her contains a variety of tortured, abstracted faces that recall Picasso’s subversive cubist portraits of the early 1910s. A pair of motionless feet poking in from the picture’s leftmost edge suggest the vastness of the scene, implying more action just out of view.
The center panel finds a man in the armchair, bottle and cigarette in hand, in three simultaneous states of being. He concurrently stares out at the viewer furiously, down at his smoldering cigarette, or to his left at the second nearly nude woman in the painting. His mangled, incomplete set of bared teeth and his sparse curly hair give him a menacing, confrontational quality. The long-limbed object of one of his multiple fixations, the second woman in the scene, exposes her backside to the viewer while gracefully holding a circular object in her outstretched left hand; a pearl bracelet decorates her wrist, and, along with her long, straight hair, distinguishes her from the other stocking-clad woman. A cracked egg shell rests on the ground, furthering the feeling of witnessing the fallout of an epic, possibly destructive, event.
More strewn trash graces the right-hand panel, with a cocked mousetrap, a broken bottle and a few more eggshells rounding out the lower register. A vertical, midcentury television set stands next to a sinister Bozo the clown-style punching bag, whose snarling face is slashed out by a slap of white paint. Mental Landscape’s clear rightward directionality deposits the viewer’s gaze into the only panel devoid of people; a repository of sorts, the final panel is a fitting destination after traversing the left and center segments.
Condo’s panoramic scene strongly suggests, and maybe even encourages, a narrative reading – but stops just short of revealing it. The three principal players are familiar to one another, but seem to avoid direct interaction or any mutual acknowledgement. The basic contours of the scene are immediately clear, but what are we to make of the group of caged, tortured faces at the painting’s left edge? What is the crawling woman reaching for in, or behind, the central armchair? Where is all this taking place? A master of carefully composed ambiguity, Condo’s best paintings leave viewers probing incomplete truths and searching for scant morsels of visual information.
The human face, perhaps Condo’s most effective visual tool, is both a source of clarity and mystery in the present lot. The myriad faces in Mental Landscape, from the poor souls trapped in the cage to the central figure enjoying a smoke and a drink in his chair, invite a broad range of readings. As is typical of Condo and his “psychological cubism”, the face is less a visual fact than a collection of contradicting emotions and states of mind. Indeed, the painting’s title makes reference to this fact, obliquely introducing the attractive possibility that the whole scene is a metaphor for the painter’s own psyche.
Whether or not this is the case, the present work is nevertheless an example of Condo’s career-long wink-and-nod engagement with predeceasing painters from Velázquez to Picasso. An explicit attempt to describe the human mind and condition with paint, Condo testifies in the open to what other painters were always after but rarely spoke about. Condo’s brazenness and assuredness in rendering the wrinkles and inconsistencies of the human mind distinguish him as a leading contemporary painter, and place him in the ring with other great modern painters-cum-psychoanalysts like Lucian Freud, Max Beckmann and Alice Neel. A heady mixture of surrealism, cubism, genre painting and portraiture, George Condo’s Mental Landscape is a substantial addition to the artist’s prodigious body of work.