Artificial Realism
George Condo
“I created the term ‘artificial realism’ back in the late ’80s. That idea about representing reality, but reality being a construct of man-made appearances. I felt like artificial realism took over when Trump was elected, not as an artistic discussion but a political discussion. It was sort of like creating a formula for disaster. Then the fake-news concept came about and everything was about fakes, and my whole thing in the early ’80s was, “Oh I paint fake masterpieces,” so I didn’t have to think about whether they were or they weren’t. I could sort of objectify everything.” — George Condo
During the Second World War Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) stayed in his cramped studio in Bologna, painting his quiet, profound still lives of vases, bottles, bowls and flowers. The Italian art critic Giuseppe Marchiori (1901-1982) wrote, “Amid the clamour of war his silent and lonely steadfastness was a bulwark; it was a noble protest of the man ‘the most out of step’ in the world.” While quarantined out in the Hamptons, American artist and iconoclast George Condo (b. 1957, Concord, NH) had to adapt to a new set of circumstances that made him see his art differently. Over three weeks he made a series of drawings in crayon, pencil and ink at his home studio, exploring the psychological impact of social distancing during lockdown and the experience of isolation. “I’m trying not to watch the news. It makes it all too ‘in the room’ instead of out there around us,” Condo told arts writer Dodie Kazanjian. “The real war is going on in the hospitals and in the governments. Artists can only do what they do.” The six works entitled Drawings for Distanced Figures, are related to his most recent painting series Distanced Figures, and explore how changes in perspective distort his subjects. In a film screened online Condo said: “Drawing is a way of life, it’s a kind of private activity that you basically do when nobody’s watching, but here we are, in a situation where nobody could possibly be watching because we’re all quarantined. We’re all sitting around at home trying to find our way into some sort of imaginary world that will make life better. I am imagining figures distanced from one another. They don’t want to be but they have to be. There are figures who are invented to resemble those who I wish I could see.” The portrait drawings each depict overlapping figures and combine multiple viewpoints so as to reflect simultaneously a spectrum of human emotions and mental states: fear, paranoia, claustrophobia, panic and distress. In earlier paintings, such as Separated by Life (1986), the physical detachment between figures indicates underlying psychological states of disconnection. The figures in this new series of works appear in pairs and are linked by intersecting lines, yet despite this apparent connection, their viewpoints don’t connect, thus emphasizing their forced separation; far from hysterical, however, these figures are portrayed with such elegant resolve that they provide an antidote, a sense of solidarity and understanding in unprecedented times of pain and confusion.
George Condo, “Together and Apart”, ink and wax crayon on paper (2020) image: © george condo / courtesy the artist and HAUSER & WIRTH
George Condo, “Molecular Figures”, pen and wax crayon on paper (2020) image: © george condo / courtesy the artist and HAUSER & WIRTH
Condo has occupied a central position in the landscape of American painting for the past four decades. Walking a line between realism and abstraction, his works are populated largely by dramatically stylized, almost cartoonish, characters with exaggerated, often grotesque features. His unique and imaginative visual language pays tribute to a vast array of art-historical traditions and genres, the portrait in particular, in order to hold a mirror up to contemporary social mores. Condo first emerged on the East Village art scene in the early 1980s as a figurative painter whose portraits evoked the work of such artists as Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). After many years in which the art of painting was said to have given up the ghost — and movements such as minimalism, conceptual art, video, performance art, body art, photography, and a host of other successors reigned supreme — thanks to painters on both sides of the Atlantic (not just New Yorkers, but also German Neo-Expressionists such as Georg Baselitz (b. 1938, Kamenz, DE) the medium was making a comeback, bristling with new energies and re-engaging with recognizable imagery. Condo’s USP, or Unique Selling Point, considered at the time to be even more radical than Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960-1988) graffiti-inspired primitivism, was a rediscovery of Old Master painting.
Indeed, from his early days, Condo has been widely recognised as what art critic Holland Cotter described in The New York Times as the “missing link” that connects the figurative tradition begun by Rembrandt (1606-1669), Picasso and Francis Bacon (1909-1992) to his contemporaries, John Currin (b. 1962, Boulder, CO), Glenn Brown (b. 1966, Hexham, UK), Dana Schutz (b. 1976, Livonia, MI) and others. Condo’s work daringly fused the sensibilities of the European tradition of portraits, landscapes and figure studies with references to popular American culture, including Playboy magazine, comics and cartoons. The artist described his first breakthrough painting The Madonna (1982) as “a fake Tiepolo” he’d made up from his memories of all the Madonna’s he had seen in museums and art books and catalogues. The painting, which is twenty inches high by sixteen wide, depicts a woman in red robes, her angular face cast down, silhouetted against a background of white clouds. Having built up the surface with alternating layers of oil paint and transparent, or semi-transparent oil glazes (a technique he’d read about on a college art history course), he decided the paint was too thick, and took a ruler, scraping some of it off. “That made it sort of blurred, like a Francis Bacon,” he said. When the painting was complete, he put it in an antique frame found in a thrift shop. “It really did look like an Old Master painting,” he said, “but with a modern edge.”
George Condo, “Linear Contact”, graphite on paper (2020) image: © george condo / courtesy the artist and HAUSER & WIRTH
George Condo, “Parallel Lives”, wax crayon on paper (2020) image: © george condo / courtesy the artist and HAUSER & WIRTH
Profoundly original, Condo’s art is populated by a cast of ghoulish characters whose bulging eyes, bulbous cheeks, proliferating limbs and protruding over or under bites mark them apart as a singular species. Indeed his drawn faces, such as those in Double Head Drawing 10 (2015), are at once cartoonish and animalistic. Condo’s work can be viewed as a multi layered experience, his pictorial vocabulary drawing upon a vast range of art-historical traditions and genres. In a way that might not seem immediately apparent, Condo borrows from old masters and modernist trailblazers alike; whereas the gruesome figures in his portraits are structured with close attention to traditional principles of composition and proportion, drawing on the work of 16th-century Dutch and Venetian masters, The Black Insect (1986) takes its inspiration from the insects and free-floating forms in many of the paintings of Joan Miró (1893-1983). Condo’s hugely diverse oeuvre bears witness to his achievement in absorbing the revolutionary genius of Düre (1471-1528) Velázquez (1599-1660), Matisse (1869-1954), Arcimboldo (1526-1593), Pollock (1912-1956), Twombly (1928-2011), and countless others, so as to create a language characteristically his own; one that investigates the macabre, the carnivalesque and the abject. Commenting on the influence of art historical masters, Condo notes “The only way for me to feel the difference between every other artist and me is to use every artist to become me” (George Condo, quoted in Stuart Jeffries, ‘George Condo: 'I was delirious. Nearly died', The Guardian, 10 February 2014, online).
Condo has described his portraits as composites of various psychological states painted in different ways, reflecting the madness of everyday life, his surrealistic works exploiting “our own imperfections — the private, off-moments or unseen aspects of humanity — that often give way to some of painting’s most beautiful moments.” Condo coined the term “Artificial Realism” to describe his approach, defined as “the realistic representation of that which is artificial”. The artist’s paintings often fuse cartoon figures and human forms into a state of metamorphosis, each existing at the nexus of a variety of emotions and psychological conditions; a scream and a laugh within a single expression. For Condo, the condition of isolation during Covid-19 lockdown carried positive connotations of seclusion in the studio space. He explains: “I love to draw and in the usual context of privacy, one doesn’t think of the term isolation or forced separation, rather it’s a space to create without being watched.”
The artist refers to his most recent works as “drawing paintings”, which he describes as “a reaction to the hierarchy that supposedly exists between drawing and painting. For me,” he continues, “there is no real difference between them, they can exist in one happy continuum.” As in previous works, Condo’s Distanced Figures synthesize pictorial languages and motifs to create what the artist describes as “composites of various psychological states”. Employing multiple perspectives, Condo presents a vividly psychological portrait exemplary of his mastery of abstraction. The concept of improvisation and the immediacy of a drawing are central. Drawing quickly and freely, he likens the tempo of a piece of music to the tempo of a drawing. In this respect, Condo’s training in classical music is important to his process of artmaking (“You are still a musician at heart,” philosopher Félix Guattari told him. “With you the polyphony of lines, forms and colours belong to a temporal dimension rather than one of spatial coordination”). Condo believes that “artists should paint up-tempo without missing a stroke, in the same way that musicians like Jimi Hendrix or Glenn Gould play without missing any notes. There is also the same degree of attention necessary when drawing slowly, as one may find in a Sarabande of Bach.”
Condo’s work oscillates somewhere between emotional figuration and abstraction, bringing the viewer in touch with a psychological exploration of human nature. Even his most abstract works — like Internal Space (2005) with its impenetrable geometric scaffolding of forms radiating from the painting’s centre — explore the furthest extremes of the human psyche. “I describe what I do as psychological cubism,” the artist said to define his hybridization of art historical influences. “Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states.” Through the process of transformation involving art historical language and an actualization of philosophical content, Condo’s paintings create a visible window into the world in which we live. “When we abstract in imagistic terms from a recognisable form — let’s say a face — to an impression of a face, we can still recall the face somewhere within this abstraction. But when we represent to the best of our ability the reverse — which is to turn an abstraction back into a recognisable form — that form is the language of abstraction as it relates to painting” (George Condo, quoted in Simon Baker, Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 109). In Distanced Figures, Condo presents the viewer with a psychological depiction, evocative of what the imagination, not the eye, sees; the mental state of each subject refracted across the composition, striking at the heart of those conscious and subconscious anxieties, brought about by the effects of a global pandemic, which are entirely outside our own control.
Throughout his career, Condo has never deviated from his personal vision, his uniquely inventive, multifarious and skilfully executed oeuvre never fails to shock and delight. The artist was engaged throughout the eighties in the inauguration of a new form of figurative painting that blended the representational and the abstract. His pictorial inventions, “imaginary portraits” and often grotesque but classically executed paintings continue to surprise and, at times, horrify. “George Condo is an artist who can reference French 18th-century portraiture and a comic strip in one and the same painting,” says Edmond Francey, International Director of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s London. “He mixes high art and low art with aplomb.” Many over the years have posed the question: can art change the world? The simple, somewhat unhelpful answer is yes and no. Drawings for Distanced Figures speaks of one singular aspect of artistic endeavour that is now the topic of many online discussions: the joy in artmaking and its cathartic powers. Condo’s Distanced Figures provide unparalleled insight into the experience of artmaking in the time of lockdown. The themes in the drawings not only respond to our current situation and the absence of human contact, and perfectly exemplify Condo’s creative mastery in the complete coexistence between his caricature of classical ideologies and his utterly clever innovation of emotional figuration within abstraction. “There’s gonna be a lot of reconstruction after this Covid-19 situation and where this seismic shift is going to take culture will be very interesting,” says Condo. “Pre-Covid, post-Covid, and I really wonder the way it’s gonna be perceived.”
Ben Weaver