.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Orange & Green Diagonal Portrait (2016) is a spectacular expression of George Condo’s energetic and intellectually rich practice. Monumental in scale, it straddles the border between figuration and abstraction. An immense human head is anatomised into facets of vibrant colour. Condo captures his subject with explosive, frenzied drips, scrapes, looping lines and brushstrokes. There are sections where the paint is so light as to be diaphanous, and others with thickly textured impasto that makes the picture seem to crackle and spark. Bicoloured eyes stare out above a zip of grinning teeth. The sky-blue background has an almost sculptural quality, strafed with strokes of the palette-knife. Graphic lines in oilstick carve through the pigment. The portrait is fractured, as the title implies, along a diagonal line, with kaleidoscopic and more naturalistic colours split between its two halves.
The intensity of this work might reflect an upheaval in Condo’s life. In 2015 he underwent surgery for a serious illness: a brush with mortality that changed his perspective. ‘I was starting to feel very scrambled up’, he said of this period. ‘… I was just freaking out doing these paintings. I was in five different places in my mind at the same time’ (quoted in J. Riefe, ‘Interview with George Condo’, The Guardian, 20 April 2016). Orange & Green Diagonal Portrait emerged from Condo’s confrontation with these demons. The figure is broken and fragmented, but also metamorphosed into a new, vital and polymorphic incarnation. It represents a powerful expansion of Condo’s ‘psychological cubism’, which seeks to depict human nature from all angles: the good and bad, the conscious and the subconscious, the intentional and the accidental.
Condo’s practice exists in fervent dialogue with art history, from the portraiture of the Old Masters to Cubism, action painting and the Pop and Neo-Expressionist work he encountered during his early years in New York. In the early 1980s Condo worked applying diamond dust onto silkscreens at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Warhol is said to have starting painting Campbell’s soup cans after his mother told him to paint what he liked best. Condo asked himself the same question. ‘Contrary to Warhol,’ writes Didier Ottinger, ‘Condo chose the museum, not the supermarket … His encyclopaedic knowledge of art history became the reservoir from which to extract an iconography’ (‘George Condo’s Schizo-Frenzy’, in George Condo: Humanoids, exh. cat., Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2023, p. 130).
Orange & Green Diagonal Portrait riffs on the Cubist deconstruction and bold black lines of Pablo Picasso, the forceful gestures of Willem de Kooning, and the fleshy fantasias of late Philip Guston. It is also inspired by music, in particular jazz: at the time he composed this work, Condo was under the influence of John Coltrane’s final studio album Expression (1967). ‘The way he digs into his saxophone,’ says Condo, ‘and just tears it up is the expression I have been after with these paintings … to just unleash absolute freedom of style, line, colour, and power’ (quoted in M. Bedard, ‘George Condo’, Flaunt, May/June 2016). Condo’s method can be compared to a musical jamming and improvisation, drawing surprising new ideas out of established elements. Orange & Green Diagonal Portrait takes this approach to exhilarating new heights.
The intensity of this work might reflect an upheaval in Condo’s life. In 2015 he underwent surgery for a serious illness: a brush with mortality that changed his perspective. ‘I was starting to feel very scrambled up’, he said of this period. ‘… I was just freaking out doing these paintings. I was in five different places in my mind at the same time’ (quoted in J. Riefe, ‘Interview with George Condo’, The Guardian, 20 April 2016). Orange & Green Diagonal Portrait emerged from Condo’s confrontation with these demons. The figure is broken and fragmented, but also metamorphosed into a new, vital and polymorphic incarnation. It represents a powerful expansion of Condo’s ‘psychological cubism’, which seeks to depict human nature from all angles: the good and bad, the conscious and the subconscious, the intentional and the accidental.
Condo’s practice exists in fervent dialogue with art history, from the portraiture of the Old Masters to Cubism, action painting and the Pop and Neo-Expressionist work he encountered during his early years in New York. In the early 1980s Condo worked applying diamond dust onto silkscreens at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Warhol is said to have starting painting Campbell’s soup cans after his mother told him to paint what he liked best. Condo asked himself the same question. ‘Contrary to Warhol,’ writes Didier Ottinger, ‘Condo chose the museum, not the supermarket … His encyclopaedic knowledge of art history became the reservoir from which to extract an iconography’ (‘George Condo’s Schizo-Frenzy’, in George Condo: Humanoids, exh. cat., Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2023, p. 130).
Orange & Green Diagonal Portrait riffs on the Cubist deconstruction and bold black lines of Pablo Picasso, the forceful gestures of Willem de Kooning, and the fleshy fantasias of late Philip Guston. It is also inspired by music, in particular jazz: at the time he composed this work, Condo was under the influence of John Coltrane’s final studio album Expression (1967). ‘The way he digs into his saxophone,’ says Condo, ‘and just tears it up is the expression I have been after with these paintings … to just unleash absolute freedom of style, line, colour, and power’ (quoted in M. Bedard, ‘George Condo’, Flaunt, May/June 2016). Condo’s method can be compared to a musical jamming and improvisation, drawing surprising new ideas out of established elements. Orange & Green Diagonal Portrait takes this approach to exhilarating new heights.