Little Dancer

A fantastical example of George Condo’s skillful juxtaposition of the innocent and the grotesque, Little Dancer conflates fragments of traditional art historical icons with contemporary culture, wantonly co-mingling elements of the stunning and the shocking, provoking a kind of mental whiplash. Inventively synthesizing a classic subject, the dancer, with his own pictorial language, Condo at once promotes the resurgence of painting as well as pushes the boundary of portraiture to a captivating level. The harlequin in Little Dancer floats mysteriously within an abstract landscape of baby blue and amber, tipping his toes atop two inverted empty wine bottles. The cheerful and candy-colored palette that Condo embellishes the clown’s costume with -- the dabs of neon green, creamy yellow, and light pink -- and the whimsical wine bottle sticking out the dancer’s cuffs, create an illusion of familiarity and optimism. However, the artist reveals the startling double identity of this cartoonish figure by rendering a distorted grimace and bulking eyes on the bitter face. Condo’s unique style of figurative portraiture allows him to convey the plurality of dispositions and serves as a visual cross-section of mental states, both the comedic and the sorrowful. “He has fashioned a mode of serious painting that is smart enough to resist taking itself too seriously. At its core, it is fueled by an unabashedly tragi-comic vision that takes the form of a compulsive engagement with contradiction—a desire to describe, evoke and intensify the tensions between seemingly incompatible elements, including gravitas and humor” (R. Rugoff, George Condo: Mental State, New York, 2011, pp. 19).
While Little Dancer instantly recalls the innocence and placid virtue of Degas or Renoir’s ballerinas, Condo transcends aspirations of ‘high’ culture by intertwining them with our more clownish natures and desires. The geometric shape of the figure’s dress and the pastel polka-dots vividly speak to the harlequins of Pablo Picasso, another master whom Condo repeatedly references. Deeply immersed in memories of both European and American traditions of painting, Condo’s canvases articulate a potent and mixed emotional charge. As a portrait, Little Dancer is both endearing and monstrous, depicting a complex character meant to amuse, yet tied up like a puppet, imperiled and imprisoned, while in turn haunting and unhinging the viewer in its melancholic isolation.