A quintessential example of George Condo’s singular and iconic approach to portraiture, Red and Green Composition belongs to the handful of paintings from the artist’s seminal Existential Portraits series that tackle the grand tradition of the nude. At the same time, it explores the visual cross section of mental states, with its tense, psychological flair in its use of jarring colours of complementary reds and greens. Painting entirely from his imagination and art historical memory, Condo synthesises influences ranging from Old Master painting to Cubism with a sensibility informed by popular culture, to construct a character that is “seductive and repulsive,” “frightening and appealing” all at once (R. Rugoff, “The Enigma of Jean Louis: Interview 14 March 2006”, in George Condo: Existential Portraits: Sculpture, Drawings, Paintings 2005/2006, exh. cat., Luhring Augustine, New York, 2006, pp. 8-9). True to Condo’s penchant for exaggeration and distortion, however, the woman’s face has been transformed into a twisted dichotomy featuring a phantom-like mask in monstrous green with menacing fangs and bulging eyes that meets our scrutiny with a confrontational gaze. The contrast between the Jekyll and Hyde-like expression of an animal-like snarl and mischievous smirk is an example of Condo’s ability to depict that which ‘goes between a scream and a smile.’ (George Condo, quoted in Ossian Ward, ‘George Condo: Interview’, Time Out, 6 Feb 2007, online). In its palpable psychological intensity, Red and Green Composition is exemplary of Condo’s approach to portraiture as a type of “Psychological Cubism”. Just like Picasso embraced multiple viewpoints in his cubist portraits of his muses, Condo incorporates a multitude of extreme mental vicissitudes.

The majority of the image is made up of a velvety ruby-red ground that would feel at home in the portraits of Diego Velázquez or the psychologically dense images of Francis Bacon. The impudent bust sits up against a blue and white striped object that resembles a beach chair. “My painting is all about this interchangeability of languages in art,” Condo notes, “where one second you might feel the background has the shading and tonalities you would see in a Rembrandt portrait, but the subject is completely different and painted like some low-culture, transgressive mutation of a comic strip” (George Condo, quoted in J. Belcove, “George Condo interview”, in Financial Times, 21 April 2013).

The theme of the reclining nude represents a key recurring motif in Condo’s oeuvre since the artist’s emergence as a figurative painter on the New York art scene nearly four decades ago. Having explored the subject matter in the late 1980s and early 1990s vis-à-vis Picasso’s nudes, in the mid-2000s Condo revisited the genre with a handful of paintings that took as their point of departure Francisco Goya’s La Maja desnuda, 1795-1800, and Édouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863. Both paintings radically subverted the conventions of a genre that advocated classical ideals of nudity – a nude woman within a contemporary setting whose defiant stare and straightforward gaze confronted the viewer. Showcasing both Condo’s remarkable draughtsmanship and virtuoso handling of paint, Red and Green Composition is exceptional in Condo’s oeuvre for the way in which it explicitly addresses the loaded history of the gaze through the nude; the female nude appears to reclaim her agency by challenging the voyeuristic impulse in our looking, and set the foundation for the artist’s celebrated Drawing Paintings from 2011 and 2012.

Condo has used Old Master techniques and subject matter to create an image that is at once timeless and contemporary, masterfully allowing the viewer to step beyond aesthetic comfort zones and embrace the honest liberality of this new style of portraiture. Above all it is Condo’s ability to capture the spectrum of human emotions, psychological states and the existential plight of humanity, which has made him one of the most revered painters of his generation.