“Reworking outmoded pictorial techniques and styles in oil and varnish, [Condo] has fashioned a polyphonic terrain of cross-reference that ranges from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from Tex Avery cartoons to Cubism and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop.Rather than being burdened by history, he seems liberated by it.”

—Ralph Rugoff

Capturing the fragmented, fractured simultaneity of our own image-saturated digital age, George Condo’s Social Media, 2017 radically expands the artist’s foundational concept of “psychological cubism,” his cast of tragi-comic characters with their familiarly distorted features animating the entire, expansive surface. Richly layered and spatially complex, in its raw, noisy energy the work embodies not only the experimental verve and vibrant potency of Condo’s practice, but his long-standing commitment to excavate the human psyche in compositions that represent be “the sum of everything that ever happened before [him].”ⁱ

Psychological Cubism and the Power of Portraiture 

From the outset of his career, Condo has explored the tension between the visible and the invisible, blending them into a single image. His bold fusion of recognizable human features with grotesquely exaggerated, cartoon-like forms would continue to challenge the boundaries of figurative painting, pushing the limits of what it can visually represent and the psychological depths it can probe. In this respect, Condo has made profound and lasting contributions to the tradition of portraiture, voraciously absorbing a vast range of art historical and pop culture references that move seamlessly between Old Masters to the confrontational approach to approach to abstract figuration developed over the course of the 20^th century by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, or Jean Dubuffet, all reimagined via the graphic vernacular of cartoons and comic strips. This devouring, digestive approach to visual culture has remained a constant throughout Condo’s forty-year career, loudly announced at its very outset with his breakthrough group of “fake old master” canvases which the artist described as “an artificial, simulated American view of what European painting looked like.”ⁱⁱ

These notions of artificiality, or, more precisely the relationship between realism and artifice have long fascinated Condo, directly informing his early concept of “Artificial Realism” as a way of describing his painting, or, what he describes as “the realistic representation of that which is artificial.” For Condo, our presentation of ourselves to the world is always already artificial to some degree, the multiple, conflicting internal states that we might experience at any given moment carefully mediated and arranged. In the late 1990s, Condo solidified his visual language with the creation of his “antipodal beings,” an imagined species whose exaggerated, over-modelled faces not only addressed painterly concerns around form and volume but also injected the genre with a new psychological intensity through their vividly expressive features, enabling Condo to expose the tension between a carefully arranged smile and the more complex, conflicted states that might be raging beneath the surface.

“I describe what I do as psychological cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. 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.’”

—George Condo

Following a move to Paris in 1985, Condo began an intensive examination of Picasso’s wide-ranging corpus, and of the Spanish artist’s own excavation of art-historical sources. In its combination of multiple, simultaneous perspectives arranged in a flattened, architectonic grid, Social Media draws especially on the compositional lessons of Picasso’s early investigations into the representational possibilities of Analytical Cubism where he fractured the forms of his subjects, introducing powerful internal rhythms by breaking his compositions into intersecting planes which no longer distinguished between object and surrounding space in their treatment.  

While these earlier psychological portraits tended to focus on individual, alienated tragi-comic figures set against sparse backgrounds in 2009 Condo embarked on his pivotal and ongoing Drawing Paintings series in which he challenged the perceived superiority of painting by combining the two disciplines in a freer, more immediate and gestural approach. In the sheer force of its energetic surface and complex internal rhythms Social Media explores the rich compositional possibilities opened up by such an approach, especially recalling the muscular mark-making of Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, notably in works from his confrontational and controversial Woman series which share in the same visual syntax of gnashing jaws, wild eyes, and violent distortions. Just as de Kooning’s Woman works still possess the ability to simultaneously attract and repulse us, Condo’s figures occupy “a position that is… As Ralph Rugoff has astutely observed, the power of these portraits comes not simply from the range of conflicting psychological states combined in a single face, but of the way in which “they solicit different kinds of looks from the viewer, how they often look back at us with eyes that don’t match or don’t even seem to belong to the same face,”ⁱⁱⁱ

In its frenzied combinations of multiple figures and moments arranged in the same, shallow picture plane Social Media visually recalls the blurring of the boundaries between abstraction and figuration pioneered by Jean Dubuffet, notably in the tangled lines and flattened figures of his Paris Cirque series, and the mature works focussed on the porous boundary between urban and interior space that followed. Such a thinning of our experience of these physical and psychological spaces is especially relevant today, with our own increasing experience of living virtually, aptly captured by the title of the present work. In its bold colours and presentation of fractured, simultaneous states of being, Socia Media reveals the beauty, horror, ecstasy, and despair that can exist within all of us and any moment, an emotional range all the more human in its complexity.

ⁱ George Condo, quoted in Simon Baker, ‘Artificial Realism’, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 53
ⁱⁱ George Condo, quoted in Ralph Rugoff, George Condo, Existential Portraits: Sculpture, Drawings, Paintings 2005/2006, New York 2006, p. 8.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ralph Rugoff, George Condo: Existential Portraits: Scultpture, Drawings, Paintings 2005/2006, exh.cat., Luhring Augustine, New York, 2006, pp. 8-9.