An kaleidoscope of brilliant colors and surging forms, Reclining Blue Form from 2011 powerfully captures the raw painterly dynamism and searing psychic intensity which characterize the very best of George Condo’s celebrated practice. Within the fractured realm of the present work, abstraction and figuration collide with thrilling velocity before the viewer’s eyes. As exaggerated features and disjointed body parts wildly careen across fragmented, abstract planes, we glimpse flashes of each of the artist’s most important touchstones: Old Master portraits, his own brand of ‘psychological Cubism,’ cartoon references, and a commitment to constantly pushing the boundaries that separate figurative and non-representational painting. Evincing an irresistible creative furor, the present work departs from Condo’s more carefully planned portraitsand towards a liberated embrace of line, color, and form. Ultimately, Reclining Blue Form revels in the unforeseen beauty and wildly alluring chaos of Condo’s improvisational genius.

Epitomized in the present work, Condo’s practice is deeply concerned with examining representations of the figure throughout art history, and the genre of portraiture is elevated to a position of tremendous importance within his creative output. Woven into the fabric of his paintings is a renewed interest in inserting art historical tropes in a playful and absurd new context that simultaneously revives, and humorously undermines, the integrity of portraiture. In its masterful contusion of abstracted bodies, Reclining Blue Form evocatively recalls Pablo Picasso’s masterful Cubist facture; yet, where Picasso radically shattered the picture plane to explore multiple viewpoints in the same moment, Condo ruptures his compositions to reveal the multifaceted and kaleidoscopic complexities of human emotion through his aptly self-termed mode of ‘psychological cubism.’ “I try to depict a character’s train of thoughts simultaneously – hysteria, joy, sadness, desperation,” the artist explains. “If you could see these things at once that would be like what I’m trying to make you see in my art.” (The artist quoted in: Stuart Jeffries, “George Condo: ‘I Was Delirious. Nearly Died’,” The Guardian, 10 February 2014, online)

While Picasso’s fractured and distorted forms have long been a source of influence for Condo, works such as Reclining Blue Form mark new area of exploration for the artist. In the whirling abstraction and sinuous forms of the present work, the influence of artists such as Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner is readily present. However, this is by no means a purely abstract composition. Rather, the painting teeters on the periphery of representation as a myriad of half-formed, clown-like visages and voluptuous feminine silhouettes tantalizingly emerge and recede across the picture plane. As Holland Cotter notes in his review of George Condo: Mental States at the New Museum in 2011: “Mr. Condo is not a producer of single precious items consistent in style and long in the making… He’s an artist of variety, plentitude and multiformity. He needs to be seen in an environment that presents him not as a virtuoso soloist but as the master of the massed chorale.” (Holland Carter, “A Mind Where Picasso Meets Looney Tunes,” The New York Times, 27 January 2011) As succinctly described by the artist himself: "The only way for me to feel the difference between every other artist and me is to use every artist to become me.” (The artist quoted in: ibid.) Crushed together in a bizarre yet resolved composition, Reclining Blue Form witnesses Condo breaking down his discrete characters, tinkering with their parts, and welding them back together in new and inventive configurations, ultimately producing a painting that, in its alluring visual chaos, serves as fitting testament to the infinite variety and complications of the modern psyche.

Artist

George Condo