Rodrigo and Two Women

George Condo’s Rodrigo and Two Women emerge from the canvas. Painted in 2007, the work is a prime example of Condo’s constant engagement with the symbols and motifs of art history. The curtains enclosing the boudoir recall the drapery of Baroque palaces, or the decorative elements and formal composition of works such as Titian’s The Venus of Urbino (1538) or Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). Presenting an unnerving psychodrama, spelled out in crisp black acrylic brushwork and charcoal, Condo’s figures are grotesque avatars inhabiting a hallucinatory realm caught between realism and surrealism. Throughout his artistic career, Condo has focused on creating an alternate universe of characters and places for the viewer to engage with. One of these characters, Rodrigo, appears in this work on the bottom left. Rodrigo — owner of a fictional brothel in Pari s— appears in many of Condo’s works and has been described by the artist as a talented gambler. Indeed, Condo’s universe is often populated by figures that appear to be mysterious creatures, actors, waiters, maître d’s, and maidens.

Condo emerged as an artist alongside Jean-Michael Basquiat and Keith Haring in New York’s East Village scene. Together, they travelled to Paris where Condo would devote an entire decade of his life to studying the Western canon and developing his style into a complex brand of comedy and irony. Condo’s humorous approach to social commentary prompts comparisons with the great caricaturists of the past, such as William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier, whilst references to Diego Velazquez, Jean Baptiste Greuze, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Eugène Delacroix, and Pablo Picasso are rife among his work. Condo’s constant borrowing from historical artists resulted in a revolutionary mode of expression that he coined ‘psychological cubism’, in which the fragmentation of the figures’ faces and bodies or objects invokes a plethora of simultaneous mental states. Condo pays particular attention to the eyes of his figures, often depicting them as bulging, tense, paranoid or in a state of rage. In this sense, reality and fantasy, past and present, morality and immorality, the sane and the insane coexist in Condo’s work, creating scenes that – like Rodrigo and Two Women – are caught between tragedy and comedy.