Eyes Wide Open, painted in 2022, represents a fresh iteration of George Condo’s signature, self-described techniques of artificial realism and psychological cubism. The human form is both recognizable as a Condo character, and unrecognizably abstracted—one cannot tell how many figures there are; which panes of peach-colored pigment are meant to be human skin; which cherry reds are tongues. With cheeks, chins, ears, and mouths fractured to cubist oblivion, George Condo keeps his figures’ eyes wide open. 

 

Condo first developed the concept of artificial realism in the late 1980s, as a way to free himself from the confines of realistic figurative representation. The framework doubled as an accurate assessment of the modern material world, and the visual inputs affecting contemporary artists. As Condo explained, it’s an idea “about representing reality, but reality being a construct of man-made appearances.”ⁱ Artificial realism functions on two levels in Condo’s work: first, at the level of his physical marks and painterly style, and then, second, on a more profound and philosophical level. 

 

With Eyes Wide Open, Condo invokes the “artificial” visual realities of art history and popular media, synthesizing high and low culture in one aesthetic output. The work employs thick black lines like those of Franz Kline, and peachy pastels and pale blues reminiscent of Willem de Kooning’s Woman paintings. The black outlines of Eyes Wide Open also recall the aesthetics of newspaper comics and television cartoons, a connection furthered by Condo’s stylized eyeballs and pearl-like teeth in gaping black mouths. As Condo rightly argues, these visual phenomena, whether contained to canvas, newsprint, or a television screen, are no less real than the natural world.

 

Eyes Wide Open captures the uniquely artificial reality of the internet and social media as well, and how Condo navigates those spaces as a contemporary artist and citizen.ⁱⁱ The work’s square canvas, for instance, is adroitly suited to be shared and re-shared on Instagram. As in his earlier works, which play with Old Master traditions of portraiture, Condo evokes centuries’ worth of representations of the human figure in Eyes Wide Open, and registers the emotional ambivalence of living in an image-saturated culture—especially one in which, thanks to social media, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish false images from reality.ⁱⁱⁱ The splintering of the human form in Eyes Wide Open comes to resonate with the sensation of scrolling through social media, seeing slices of bodies, lives, and lifestyles, in an infinite queue of images.

 

Condo employs his concept of psychological cubism to register the emotional tenor of contemporary digital society. As the artist explains, with psychological cubism, he breaks the human form—especially the face—down to component parts in the lineage of Pablo Picasso, one of his greatest artistic influences. However, for Condo, physical fragmentation of the body on the canvas is a formal tool towards a larger aim of emotional fragmentation; it grants him the ability to show “two or three sides of a personality at the same time.”^iv In Eyes Wide Open, Condo’s psychological cubism records conflicting emotions, as visible in the eyes of his figures. The eye at left, vertically-oriented and gendered male in Condo’s visual idiom, registers shock or alarm, while the eye at right, almond-shaped with feminine lashes, has a glint of wry self-awareness in its yellow iris. The visual potency of these signs speaks to the enduring legibility and relevance of Condo’s artistic vision to our contemporary realities.

 

 

ⁱ  George Condo, quoted in Ben Weaver, “Artificial Realism,” The London List, 2020, online.

ⁱⁱ Condo, quoted in Keith Estiler, “Sculptures Don’t Lie: George Condo Talks New Exhibit, Kanye West, Fake News & More,” Hypeart, Apr. 29, 2017, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.

^iv Condo, quoted in Julie Belcove, “George Condo interview,” Financial Times, Apr. 21, 2013, online.