"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."
A kaleidoscope of surging forms and dense figuration, The Good Old Days is a sensational example of George Condo’s ability to meld flatness and sculptural depth with thrilling velocity. Through a dizzying assemblage of form and figure, the present work revels in Condo’s most significant touchstone: Picasso’s Cubist fracture. Playfully undermining the integrity of traditional portraiture through its masterful contusion of abstracted bodily forms, The Good Old Days is a striking reflection of Condo’s self-termed mode of ‘psychological cubism’. Further elaborating on his desire to reproduce the emotional spectrum of the human experience, Condo mused: “It’s what I call artificial realism. That’s what I do. I try to depict a character’s train of thoughts simultaneously - hysteria, joy, sadness, desperation. If you could see these things at once that would be like what I’m trying to make you see in my art.” (the artist quoted in: Stuart Jeffries, “George Condo: ‘I was delirious. Nearly Died,’” The Guardian, 10 February 2014) The gracefully churning collision of form that defines Condo’s oeuvre is perhaps one of the most honest and accurate representations of a complicated modern psychology in the art historical canon: glee, rage, insanity, loneliness, as well as cheeks, and eyes, are crushed together in a visceral state of being. Test.mes nt to the lasting impact of George Condo’s highly influential and experiential practice, works by the artist reside in permanent collects ions of esteemed institutions including the Broad collects ion, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate Modern, London.
Market Precedent: George Condo
Executed in 2015, The Good Old Days marvels in Condo’s unraveling and subsequent reassembly of various pictorial languages. Strikingly reminiscent of The Portuguese – George Braque’s genre-defining Cubist masterpiece – the present work references this art historical period in both its compositional structure and nostalgically cliché title. Monumentally influential on Condo and his output, together Braque and Picasso possessed a distinct ability to overcome the unified singularity of objects and people, and instead transform them into something jarringly fragmented. In the same vein as his Cubist predecessors, The Good Old Days sees Condo breaking down a discrete character, tinkering with its parts, and welding it back together in new and inventive configurations, ultimately producing a painting that, in its alluring visual chaos, serves as fitting test.mes nt to the infinite variety and complications of the human psyche. A rich optical puzzle spliced by overlapping forms and charcoal lines, the figure’s human features clash, churn and collide in a prodigious yet whimsical riddle.
“For Condo, things would appear to exist in terms of line, colour and form, life itself is form - form on the throes of ceaseless change, expansion, entanglement- form enamoured of its attendant colour-signs and subtly flowing or violently contrasting colour-textures… Rhythms interweave and join forces, successive dislocations and variations of colour define a chromatic ambience, forms expand and are controlled in the dynamism of the structural organisation.”
Following a nine-month stint as the diamond duster in Andy Warhol’s Factory, George Condo emerged onto the 1980s New York art scene alongside seminal figures such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Like Haring and Basquiat, Condo was critically engaged throughout the eighties in the inauguration of a new form of figurative painting that stylistically blended the representational and the abstract. Through a prolific output of compelling yet grotesque portraits, Condo established himself by the turn of the century as one of the preeminent figurative painters of the contemporary era. Test.mes nt to this accomplishment, Condo’s method of extrapolating and distorting traditional figurative motifs through an abstract lens has influenced an entire generation of artists working today. Acknowledging the eye of the observer, Condo once remarked: “It’s not just the character in the paintings, it’s also going to be about the people who come to see the paintings and what it does to their mental state, to see all these different reflections of humanity, from all walks of life, happening at the same t.mes on the wall.” (George Condo, quoted in: Maria Cashdan, ‘The Mental States of George Condo’, Huffington Post, 25 May 2011) As such, the powerful visual and emotive impact of Condo’s Cubist portraits lie in their ability to function as a prism that refracts different and often conflicting mental states – not just of the subject, but also of the viewer.
Building upon years spent refining and maturing his iconic figurative style, The Good Old Days embodies an artist at the height of his career, utterly uninhibited and full of instinctive creative fervor. A knife-edge dance between the familiar and the alien, the beautiful and the grotesque, the present work symbolizes the splintering of identity and the challenge of maintaining a coherent sense of self, as materialized through fractured visages on the canvas. An inevitable result of the whirling abstraction and sinuous shapes of the present work, the moment one picks out a form, it slips back into the delirium of the whole. Exuding a mystifyingly psychological aura with dynamic permutations of line, color, and shape, The Good Old Days endures as a poignant and visually arresting reminder of Condo’s elusive genius that permeates from the battleground of his canvas.
