The Wooden Horse

"The key to such a delicate balance lies in Condo's assertion that he 'sees' figures in abstraction, or at least, under the pressure of his process, both forms, and forms of painting, come to resemble their opposites, often with surprising consequences. The pratfalls and pitfalls of resemblance are everywhere in the 'Expanding Canvases' of the 1980s, and indeed in many of the more singular 'abstract' compositions from the same time (Wooden Horse, for example) that reference the forms of figures in only the most ambivalent and ambiguous ways, hovering undecidedly between resemblance and misrecognition. As Condo has remarked: 'you no longer have to say "this is a figure, look what I've done to it". You just eliminated the figure entirely until it was almost a ghost in your brain that was described as pure paint.'"
—S. Baker, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 123