GEORGE CONDO | Impressions of Jean Louis

Marlborough Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some tiny spots of light wear to all four corner tips and some short, faint and unobtrusive rub marks to the extreme bottom edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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With delicately dabbed, gestural brushwork reminiscent of Georges Seurat's iconic landscapes providing a serene backdrop to an incongruous and recognisably Condoesque pair of eyes, Impressions of Jean Louis comprises a later addition to George Condo’s career-defining series of portraits that begun in the early 1980s. Depicted in sartorial, rakish elegance at tragicomic odds with his unusual features, Jean Louis is one of the phantasmagoric fictional characters that appear in Condo’s portraiture. Almost all of Condo’s portraits straddle disparate aesthetics, generating an instability in the appearance of Jean Louis that reflects not just his hidden psychological inconstancy, but an inconstancy in the viewer. We – like Jean Louis – inhabit a world in which there is a disorienting glut of interacting past styles, genres and conventions, all of which are distorted by the eye of the present. This overloaded historicism makes present experience of the work both nostalgic and uncanny. Like the subjects of the most well-known of Condo’s portraits, such as Jesus (2002) and Memories of Rembrandt (1994), the subject in Impressions of Jean Louis appears filtered through the disjunctive pathways of contemporary memory: aesthetic lenses that transform the remembered into something that’s the same as before, and yet irremediably different. Condo is a lover of artistic languages. While his New York contemporaries of the 1980s – including Julian Schnabel and David Salle – elaborate an involved postmodern pastiche amalgamating disjointed images into a patchwork of quotations, Condo sets himself apart from his peers in his congruence of a variety of art historical influences into a single compelling image. This is not repudiation, it is a creative form of homage. Drawing by turns on Caravaggio, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Goya and – in this case – the Impressionists, Condo uses the traditional rhetoric of portraiture to grant his subjects a compelling psychological presence not in spite but because of their strangeness.

The influence of Classicism has conditioned us to see the face in portraiture as the focal point of personal narrative. It is the text from which we are supposed to read the true character of the subject. Impressions of Jean Louis – exhibiting a facial vocabulary of humanoid figures first seen in Little Rosie (1996) and The Drinker (1996) – embodies Condo’s playful deconstruction of this idea. The familiarity of the figurative, Impressionistic techniques used by Condo causes us to empathise with the depicted subject, an empathy then interrupted by bathos as the techniques of high-art jar with the cartoonish face staring out at us. Tenderness is not absent from Condo’s portrait. Alone and dignified in an immaculate bow tie, the subject is presented as both debased and noble; obedient to the conventions of the very society from which he is estranged. And yet the face the viewer ends up seeing is so alien, corporeal and ultimately opaque that it leaves us wondering what exactly it is to which we are akin; what exactly it is with which we presume to empathise.