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Sunday 16 February

George Condo, the Great Distorter of Our Time

Published on: 19 November 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 5 minutes

Born in 1957, George Condo, master of artificial realism, crafts psychological portraits dissecting the human soul with surgical precision and shamanic madness. His grotesque characters, with crooked teeth and bulging eyes, emerge as the true heroes of our dysfunctional era.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: George Condo, born in 1957, the enfant terrible of Concord, New Hampshire, who became the undisputed master of artificial realism, never ceases to amaze us. At a time when some collectors are raving about jpegs sold at exorbitant prices, he continues to paint with a rage and elegance that would make Picasso himself pale. Yes, I said Picasso, and I stand by it.

This existential rage emanating from his canvases recalls what Nietzsche described as Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. On one hand, the perfect technical mastery inherited from the great masters; on the other, the primal chaos rumbling in every portrait. His grotesque characters, with their crooked teeth and bulging eyes, are the true heroes of our dysfunctional era.

Take his psychological portraits, for instance. These distorted faces stare back at us as unsettling mirrors of our fragmented consciousness. Condo doesn’t paint portraits; he dissects the human soul with the precision of a surgeon and the madness of a shaman. This is what he calls “psychological cubism”, a term he invented, perfectly fitting when observing his works. Each canvas is a session of visual psychoanalysis where Freud meets Francis Bacon in a dingy East Village bar.

The first characteristic of his work lies in his ability to merge art history with our delirious present. His references range from Rembrandt to Willem de Kooning, passing through Goya and Picasso, but he digests and regurgitates them in a completely personal way. It’s as if all of art history went through a blender with a dose of lysergic acid. The result? Works that are both classical and utterly contemporary.

And don’t tell me it’s easy to do “fake old master.” Condo doesn’t copy or parody; he creates a new pictorial language. It’s what Walter Benjamin called “aura” in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, except here, the aura is deliberately artificial, constructed, like a film set that’s more real than life.

The second characteristic of his work is his creation of what he calls “artificial realism”. A concept echoing Jean Baudrillard’s theories on simulacra and simulation, but far more visceral. His characters don’t exist in reality, yet they are more real than your neighbors. They embody all our neuroses, fears, and unspoken desires. It’s as if Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari decided to turn to painting after writing Anti-Oedipus.

Look at The Stockbroker or The Psychoanalytic Puppeteer: these figures are archetypes of our era, perfect representations of what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”. Except here, the spectacle turns into a waking nightmare. These bankers with carnivorous smiles, these figures of power deformed by their own hubris, are the true monsters of our time.

And let’s talk about these monsters! They are magnificent in their ugliness, sublime in their deformity. Condo pulls off the feat of making us love what should repel us. This is exactly what Julia Kristeva discussed in Powers of Horror: the abject becomes fascinating, the repulsive becomes alluring. These twisted faces, these deformed bodies are like contemporary vanitas reminding us of our own mortality.

There is something in his work that recalls what Michel Foucault described in The Order of Things regarding Velázquez’s Las Meninas: a complex play of gazes and representations directly involving us in the work. Except in Condo’s case, the gazes are insane, the representations fractured, and we are unwittingly drawn into a contemporary danse macabre.

His collaborations with musicians like Kanye West only confirm his ability to transcend boundaries between “high” and “low” culture. Just as Theodor Adorno spoke of the culture industry, Condo plays with the codes of popular culture while maintaining uncompromising artistic rigor. The cover of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy became iconic precisely because it defied the conventions of the music industry.

His influence on an entire generation of artists is undeniable. From John Currin to Lisa Yuskavage to Glenn Brown, all owe him something. But unlike these epigones, who often merely ride a stylistic wave, Condo continues to explore new territories. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, there are images that “prick” us (the punctum). Condo’s paintings are full of these points of pain that pierce us.

Some critics, particularly those who imagine contemporary art must be “tidy” and conceptual, criticize his unbridled expressionism. But as Theodor Adorno wrote in his Aesthetic Theory, true art resists normalization. Condo’s monsters are our monsters, his demons are our demons, and his madness is the exact reflection of our deranged era.

In an increasingly sanitized art world, where galleries resemble showrooms and collectors buy from photos, Condo remains true to the materiality of painting. There is something deeply physical in his work, a presence that recalls what Maurice Merleau-Ponty described in Eye and Mind: painting as the incarnation of thought.

His recent work shows a fascinating evolution. The compositions are becoming more complex, the colors more intense, as if the madness of today’s world demanded an even more radical pictorial response. This is what Jacques Rancière would call a “distribution of the sensible”: a new way of seeing and making others see our shared reality.

Of course, some will say it’s all just gratuitous provocation, a pictorial circus to dazzle the crowd. But as Georges Bataille wrote in Inner Experience, true transgression doesn’t lie in spectacle but in questioning our deepest certainties. And that’s exactly what Condo does: he shakes our aesthetic and moral certainties.

Condo’s painting is an exercise in controlled imbalance, a dance on the razor’s edge between order and chaos, reason and madness. Condo remains a sincere painter, almost naïve in his belief in the power of painting. As Walter Benjamin might have said, he maintains a form of “aura” in a world that has largely lost it. His monsters are our guardians, his distortions our truths.

Go see a George Condo exhibition. You may leave disturbed, unsettled, but certainly not indifferent. Because as Gilles Deleuze wrote, art isn’t here to reassure us but to make us think. George Condo is more than a painter: he’s a seismograph recording the tremors of our time. His distorted portraits are the true faces of our era, and his monstrosities are our most faithful mirrors. His paintings are like lighthouses in the night: unsettling but essential.

Reference(s)

George CONDO (1957)
First name: George
Last name: CONDO
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • United States of America

Age: 68 years old (2025)

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