George Condo: Painting In Search Of Lost Time

Geroge Condo’s new exhibition, ‘People Are Strange,’ the opening installation at Hauser and Wirth’s second Los Angeles location (in West Hollywood in what was a former car showroom), is a gorgeous, exuberant show, an exciting and inspiring post-pandemic “welcome back.”

The exhibition, on view through April 22, 2023, features fourteen large scale canvases and one gold-plated sculpture. Of the canvases, nine are portraits, one is a large group portrait, and the others are abstractions all painted in the last year. The space is an unusual column-free trapezoidal shape affording a variety of wall spaces in which to have unobstructed views of the large canvases.

These new works continue Condo’s exploration of what he has at times called “Psychological Cubism” and reflect his absorption of Picasso’s vernacular to construct and deconstruct portraits that reflect not only different emotional states but also the passage of time.

Condo, who grew up in New Hampshire and then Lowell, Mass., recalls his first drawing as a picture he made after coming home from Church one Sunday when he was three years old. He combined Jesus on the Cross with the stained-glass window at his local St. Mary’s Church in New Hampshire (His mother kept the drawing, and Condo has exhibited it on special occasions such as his career survey at Washington D.C.’s Phillips Collection).

From the beginning Condo was a figurative artist set on drawing realistically. As a child Condo often went fishing with his brother and often brought home drawings of fish for his mother. When other kids were playing little league, Condo was taking painting classes at the YWCA.

“My mother was a huge reader,” Condo said, “A book a day.” And on their bookshelf was a copy of Jack Kerouac’s “Dr. Sax.” And when Condo pointed to it she said, “That’s Jack Kerouac, that horrible writer that lives next door,” Condo said, laughing at the memory. Because his mother said there was bad language in Kerouac’s work, Condo read everything Kerouac had written, of which he found “On the Road” the least interesting. However, Kerouac did have an impact.

“What I learned from Kerouac was how to make paintings, in the sense of non-revising my brushstrokes or my lines… [My series] ‘The expanding canvases’ were based on the idea of ‘Why don’t you just do what Jack Kerouac did’ — which is automatic writing and go up there and paint what you want to paint. Tell your story, be truthful to what come straight out of your mind. Use your memory and everything you’ve ever seen in art history, in your life, and just put it all out there on the canvas and not revise it and see what happens.”

Condo spent two years at Lowell University (now UMass Lowell) where his father taught mathematics and physics. Lowell had no studio art major. Instead, Condo majored in music theory (Condo’s other great passion was music, classical and jazz) and studied art history as well. Condo recalls one teacher in particular, Liana Cheney, who taught a course in chiaroscuro in Art, which Condo says, “really enlightened me into the beauty of darkness and light happening in a painting, and the idea of removing religiosity from painting, turning it into the more human aspect.”

The summer after his second year at Lowell, Condo went to Paris to join his older brother there, after which he never went back to UMass. Instead, he got a job in Boston at a silk screen shop where he met a group of guys including Mark Dagney and Daved Hild who were in a punk band called ‘The Girls’. They were also all art students who had attended such art schools such as the Boston Museum School and RISD. This was the era of Punk and No Wave bands such as Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Tom Verlaine and Television, which were as much art projects as bands. Condo joined The Girls as bass player. (You can find a half dozen of their abstract art and song/noise soundscape videos on YouTube).

After becoming known on the Boston scene, The Girls landed a gig in New York at Tier 3 (TR 3), the New York No Wave club in Tribeca. Opening for them was a band called Gray, and the first person Condo met in New York at the club was a band member of Gray who performed on a synthesizer-connected clarinet and was tinkering with the electronics on stage for their set-up. His name: Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“I asked him what he did,” Condo recalled, “He said he was an artist.”

That night, Basquiat’s band played, and then Condo’s band played, after which they went out. Basquiat took them to the Mudd Club where Condo and he discovered they were kindred spirits.

Condo returned to Boston where The Girls played increasingly bigger gigs at all the local clubs. They began to be in demand. However, Basquiat had told Condo that if he wanted to be an artist, he had to live in New York. “In 1979, right after Christmas, I told my parents I was going to move to New York. They were petrified.”

Condo found a room at the Hotel Iroquois in Time Square for $7 a night. 42^nd Street hadn’t been Disneyfied yet: It was the Times Square of “Taxi Driver” with bums begging change, hustlers doing three card monte, and the theaters showed Kungfu or porno movies. “There was a Howard Johnson’s there,” Condo recalled, and when you went there, “you felt like you were in an Edward Hopper painting.”

To afford an apartment, Condo realized he would have to find a job. “Kelly Girls,” an employment agency, sent him to work sorting out slides in an art gallery. From there he got a job working for Rupert Smith who was a master printmaker and at whose loft on Duane Street, many of Andy Warhol’s silk screens were being made. His first task was to write a press release, after which he was asked to take down on paper everything that went on there. Warhol wanted a record. However, once Smith found out he knew how to silk screen, Condo was asked to join the assembly line producing the prints for Warhol’s latest series. Condo recalled: “I officially got the job as diamond duster on the entire “Myth” series,” (a portfolio Warhol made of images of fictional characters from the 20^th Century including Superman, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Santa Claus. Diamond Dust was mixed into the colors). During the entire nine months Condo worked there, Warhol never came to Smith’s loft.

Years later when he met Warhol, Condo never mentioned he had worked for him. However, on several occasions when he and Warhol were at a dinner, they would share a cab uptown and talk about Art. “He was very informed about Art History,” Condo recalled. “He had an amazing memory [and] an encyclopedic knowledge of European museums and private collections.”

In the mid-1980s Condo left New York, first to Amsterdam where he was in a group show, and from there to Cologne, Germany where he met Monika Sprüth who gave Condo his first solo show. There was a group show coming up in Paris, so he went there. Condo ended up spending the next nine months living in a hotel on the Right Bank.

He returned to New York on occasion and when there he’d use Keith Haring’s studio to paint (they’d met in 1983 when Haring attended a show of Condo’s and bought several works). It was at Haring’s studio that Condo made one of his breakthrough paintings, Dancing to Miles, 1985-86 (now in the collection of the Broad Museum).

It’s a crowded painting full of references, full of allusions to Cubism, European Art, Renaissance figures, to Picasso, drawn and painted, abstract and realistic, painted in the colors of an earlier time and very modern at the same time. “Dancing to Miles” reminds me of Bruce Springsteen’s first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, a waterfall of word pictures like Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61, all the work of young men bursting with creative energy. More than anything., Dancing to Miles, is propulsive and improvisational like Jazz itself and yet a work that demonstrates the artist’s control, like the music of Miles Davis. But for Condo it was all about “improvisation and the spirit of Kerouac in the expanding canvases.”

Condo recalls that while he was working on the painting, Warhol came to Haring’s studio. “Warhol came over that day and took a lot of shots of me and Keith. According to Condo, Warhol said to him, “You mean you just go up to the canvas and paint anything you like? I could never do that.”

Condo returned to Paris, but missing his friends, he convinced Basquiat and Haring to visit him. “I remember Jean-Michel coming over to my studio there. I was so concerned about his health… he was taking so much stuff. I told him Jean – you are going to die from this. This is way too much.”

Condo recalled Basquiat as very much a prankster: One time after Basquiat did “a pile of heroin,” they went to celebrated Paris nightspot Les Bain Douches for dinner. Basquiat revealed he’d bought all these stink bombs. Once the place was really crowded Basquiat set off the stink bombs. “People were leaving because it smelled disgusting.” Condo suggested they run out of the club. But Basquiat said they needed to stay because Basquiat “wanted to study the expressions on their face of complete horror.” Condo never forgot that. Nor will I: To my mind, “complete horror” is not a bad way of explaining the look on many of the skulls Basquiat painted.

The Eighties ended tragically for Condo’s friends. First, Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987 of complications following gall bladder surgery. The following year Basquiat died of an overdose; and in 1990, Keith Haring died of complications from AIDS. The deaths hit him hard.

“That whole period of work from 1987 to 1990 was very tortured… They were called ‘The Unexpected Nightmare Series’… I’ve got a big show coming up in 2025 at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and I’m going to show a lot of those paintings that nobody’s ever seen… They really do reflect the existential horror of what was happening in my life and the lives of those that I loved around me.”

Condo returned to New York, got married, had kids. “It wasn’t until I had children that I realized there’s new life in the world. I don’t think anything else could have replaced those three guys for me.”

During his time in Paris, Condo had immersed himself in philosophy, reading widely and deeply and becoming friends with French philosophers such as Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. This was the time of Roland Barthes and the French structuralists, and Guattari wrote extensively on semiotics and its relationship to subjectivity wanting to deconstruct the existing orders of capitalism and fascism while, at the same time, creating a new worldview that marries subjectivity to values. All this, too, became subsumed in Condo’s work.

As Condo explained, “I was born in 1957 during a time of abstraction, which was very much about deconstructing classicism. So, what I wanted to do was consider the idea of a reconstruction – to reconstruct abstraction back into realism.”

“I drew the line between the interpretation of the unknown and the known,” Condo explained further. “I thought dealing with the known — the idea of the human figure as opposed to the human being, you could call it an ontological journey into the psyche. The fact that as humans we perceive what’s external to ourselves as real. We don’t necessarily see ourselves the way others see ourselves. So that’s when I started to think about that there were psychological compositions that were based on the experiences that to one’s own mind is exactly what we think – but it is not the way others see it.” And so, Psychological Cubism.

Over the years, Condo has made a prodigious number of paintings in a wide variety of styles – and moods. Some of his paintings court the ugly and express the ugliness of individuals and of our time. Recently, at Frieze LA, Venus Over Manhattan gallery had Condo’s “Client # 9” or as Condo called it, “his Elliott Spitzer painting” – It is like an X-rated Krazy Kat drawing – and just the kind of painting you’d want if your idea of fun is sticking your thumb in the eye of polite society. Which spoke to the mood of that moment in New York.

Condo’s natural gifts combined with a lifetime of drawing and painting, make some see his work as facile yet the painterly nature of his investigations and Condo’s willingness to deconstruct and build anew his own work, sometimes doing so in the same painting has won Condo the admiration of a younger generation of painters.

To fast forward to the show at Hauser and Wirth, the exhibition is called “People Are Strange,” which was the name of a hit song by the Doors – which Condo seized upon for the West Hollywood show because, as Condo said, “What is more LA than the Doors?” Condo also wanted to express the cognitive dissonance of the current post-Truth era where opinion trumps news, and Trump trumps morality and facts. “I looked for an artistic way of describing my work – that it is a realistic representation of that which is artificial. And now the realistic representation of that which is artificial, is our news.”

“I say, who are the strange people?” Condo mused. “The ones who make people homeless or the homeless. I think it’s the ones who make people homeless. I think the people who are strange are the George Santos, Lindsey Graham, and Kevin McCarthy crew.”

The original name for the exhibition was Transformations, which speaks to the works themselves. These portraits are, in a very Proustian way, about the passage of Time.

In the painting Transformations (which can be seen from Santa Monica Blvd when driving by), there is an assemblage of people or one person in various ages and states. In some ways this painting reminds me of “Dancing with Miles” in the abundance of forms; yet this is the work of a more settled and successful artist. There is a profusion of eyes populating the canvas, but there is no feeling of surveillance or claustrophobia. The turquoise and lavender in the painting is strangely calming, welcoming, joyous even. The painting has a rhythm in the way its lines dance up and down across the canvas as if this were a pictorial analogue to a Jackson Pollock painting.

We see this same effect in Transitional Portrait in Turquoise and Gold which also communicates what Baudelaire referred to as “luxe, calme, et volupté.” — a harmony, a happiness even, in seeing this portrait of a woman both young and vibrant and elderly and pensive.

“These new paintings are… more melodic,” Condo told me, “The passage of time that goes in and out of where we are today [by which] a beautiful woman turns into an older woman.” Condo explained that these paintings are not about beauty or ugliness — just the passage of time which “you see it all at once” in these works.

Nonetheless, Condo believes his paintings exist in the eyes of the viewer independent of the painter’s intentions. Condo said he occasionally asks himself. “What’s in the mind of a painting?” Condo’s answer: “Nothing. A painting is inanimate object, like a rock… It’s essentially just a canvas with paint on it.” What’s in a painting is, as Condo sees it, “what somebody superimposes of their own vision and their own thoughts about the world onto that image.” And this happens, Condo explained, “from day one.”

One of the other standout paintings in the show is Interaction, in which black lines on a white canvas render a Cubist deconstruction of a woman’s figure in which we see the ease of Condo’s figurative abilities and the energy with which he has built up a surface of marks, erasures and brushstrokes. There is something of de Kooning in this work (both Willem and Elaine) that show Condo’s furious energy, his gestural ability to improvise and yet arrive at a work that is at the same time resolved as it is unfinished, leaving us waiting to look deeper and want more.

Condo explained: “In my mind, if I can say that that painting is alive, when I leave it… I gave up being a musical performer because it takes place in time. When the concert’s over, there’s nothing but empty space. Everybody gets up and leaves. When a painting’s over, it’s got to keep singing. It’s got to keep playing, the volume has to be turned up at all times. I like a painting that’s got volume 10 — like a large Marshall amp,” Condo said, laughing.

“The idea of the paintings is to just say, you are the viewer,” Condo told me. “You look at the painting and you are the one who decides what the narrative is. My narrative could be completely different than the narrative that the others might see.” Condo said that for this show, “My internal narrative is about the idea of the passage of time in the painting. So, yes, the Proustian aspect of these works is the remembrance of time passed.”

“I once read something that Kerouac said about Dostoyevsky. He said that there’s so much energy rushing towards the first sentence,” Condo said. “And that energy rushing towards the first sentence is the history of everything that happened before that very first sentence is written. And I think all the energy rushing towards those paintings includes my love for Picasso, my love for Rothko, my love for Newman, my love for Caravaggio for all of that shading…. It’s all in there rushing towards those paintings. And I think that’s what gives them their energy.”