“It’s like Rembrandt painting Bugs Bunny. Instead of painting a Campbell’s soup the way Andy Warhol did, I would take it and put it on a table and shine a light, like a candle light, on it and paint it in the style of Georges de La Tour [...] Ultimately I don’t want to just paint somebody else’s painting. The idea is to take all the information from every painting I like in history and to put it all back together in an original way.”
—George Condo
After spending three decades at the epicentre of the global art world, American artist George Condo continues to push the boundaries of what it means to engage with a painting. In his unmistakable fracturing of the figure and his interest in modes of art historical rediscovery and reclamation, Condo’s influence on popular culture and a generation of younger artists in both aesthetic and conceptual terms continues to make itself felt.
After tuning in to the famed New York art scene of the 1980s, working for a short while in Warhol’s factory and befriending the likes of Jean-Michael Basquiat and Keith Haring, Condo developed a radical painterly voice which integrated certain technical and compositional aspects of Old Master painting with his own unbridled, psychologically charged subject matter. By focusing on the dramatic and virtuoso qualities of these iconic Old Master works and reimagining them for his own, contemporary moment, Condo extended Duchampian notions concerning the reuse of objects and images to historic painterly languages, ‘an iconic form of painting’ which in the artist’s own words resulted in something ‘strong enough and recognizable enough as being my own, rather than having been taken from historic references.’This set him apart from the more self-consciously post-modernist trends of the time and built a foundation for younger artists - the likes of John Currin, Cecily Brown and Glenn Brown - to employ painting’s history in a non-appropriative, cyclical manner.
Dramatically lit against a deep, tenebrous background, Condo’s Jesus is one of four oil paintings created in 2007 which radically reimagine the iconography of the Crucifixion. The rich cross-hatching creates a deeply toned background which, coupled with the chiaroscuro interplay between emergent light and shadow, pays homage to the artists of the High Renaissance and Baroque. Further than these visual cues, Condo also returned to certain compositional techniques favoured by Old Masters. As well as experimenting with underpainting (where an initial monochromatic layer establishes the arrangement of the piece), Condo closely studied diagonal and pyramidal compositional structure alongside a registered copyist that he met at the Louvre. In this respect, works such as Jesus are enduring in their manipulation of composition and light and parallels can readily be drawn with master works by the likes of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn and Diego Velázquez.
Although utterly contemporary, there is a distinct untimeliness to Condo’s work, accumulating and amalgamating a wide range of art historical and iconographic references whilst defying easy classification. The polka dots of bright colour which emanate from Christ’s body allude to both Surrealism and Pointillism, offering an unexpected twist on the reverential subject of the crucifixion. Valuing ‘the opportunity as an artist to destroy authority by depicting it in your own terms’, Condo does not just invoke religious iconography, but absorbs it and makes it his own. He describes how the pointillist constellation surrounding Christ represents his released spirit, but he also states: ‘In my opinion, it’s like a grand homecoming parade.’ This denotes a tragicomic aspect to the piece which is found throughout Condo’s oeuvre: the agonising scene of the crucifixion reconfigured in a burst of brightly-coloured confetti, brining a celebratory brightness against the gloom.
Through such hybrid stylisation and raw narrative energy, Condo makes the infamous story of Christ’s crucifixion his own. The fractured face of Christ, which introduces a Cubistic and caricatured element to the piece, adds yet another layer of visual complexity. In the same way as appropriation of Old Master techniques and motifs, Condo translates 20th Century stylistic qualities into something unique. Showcasing the artist’s signature psychological cubist style, Christ’s face here is made up of simultaneous yet conflicting expressions and emotions, the volatile facial language fluctuating between rage, horror, pain, and even mischief. Such reimagining of religious subject matter alludes to Condo’s idea of ‘Objective Representation’ in religious imagery. Stemming from the notion explored by certain Abstract Expressionist artists that abstract art can provoke an entirely subjective experience, Condo inverts this concept, questioning whether the subject of religious iconography can incite an objective response unbiased by a prior reading of the biblical narrative. At once grotesquely caricatured and deeply human, the psychological intensity of the titular Jesus directly engages the viewer, departing from more traditional representations of a quietly composed Christ and circumventing the text-based Biblical narrative for a more visceral and immediate impact. This human study of raw emotion and tragi-comedic reconfiguration of religious iconography climax in a canvas which brims with pathos and vulgarity, a theatrical melodrama that both attracts and repulses us.
Receiving both critical and institutional recognition over the years, George Condo represented the United States at La Biennale di Venezia in both 2013 and 2019. His work can be found in permanent collections such as the Musée National d’Art Modern, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others. Jesus has been exhibited in numerous institutions including the New Museum, New York; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Hayward Gallery, London; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an de Donau.