George Condo: Mental States presents the artists work over the past thirty years and charts the development of his distinctively provocative and slightly unnerving portraiture style. The exhibition, which is divided into three main thematic sections (portraiture, abstract-figuration and mania and melancholy) related directly to my exploration of distortion, especially facial distortion and abstraction. In fact, from the beginning of his career, Condo's work has focused on redefining our basic ideas of portraiture; in paintings such as 'Red Antipodular', 1996, we see that Condo's technique derives from Classical and modernist painting, yet the characters like the one shown in this image are entirely his own creation, meaning his paintings take on a playful, fantasy quality. Condo regularly features these misfit characters in his works; while the before mentioned painting features Big Red, a character Condo describes as 'a being that was ushered in from the periphery of my consciousness and brought forward to be painted', other paintings depict Jean-Louis, an imaginary butler and Rodrigo, a low life type.
Although I was entertained by paintings featuring Condo's fantasy characters, such as 'The Butler', 2000, I was most attracted to the more figurative portraits depicting identifiable characters from popular culture. For example Condo's 2009 portrait 'Skinny Jim' does not evoke one particular clown but rather draws upon the theme of the circus. Yet Condo subverts this establishment by placing a cigarette in the clown's limp left hand, thereby challenging the role of the clown as a children's entertainer and alluding to more sinister associations. Yet above all it is the face - the focal point of the image - which most surprises and disturbs our viewing experience. While the clown's eyes are unsymmetrical and out of proportion, Condo's character is painted with several different mouths - three to be exact - stretched in a broken line across his face. These distorted features have the immediate effect of disorientating and confusing the viewer. However I found these portraits the most intriguing and humorous and came away from the exhibition wanting to apply Condo's wit and playfulness to my own paintings.
For many of the same reasons stated above, I was also drawn to 'Dreams and Nightmares of the Queen', 2006, although due to the iconic value of the paintings subject (the queen), I enjoyed this painting even more as it was a clear mockery of the British establishment. Like 'Skinny Jim', here Condo has rendered the queen's features strange and alien by contorting and introverting her mouth. In fact, by corrupting her image, Condo has created a caricature of the queen and satirised the entire monarchy. It was this aspect of Condo's paintings which I was most eager to channel into my own work. After observing the facial disfigurations in many of Condo's portraits, I became drawn to collage as a medium through which I could play and experiment with facial composition and create an image reminiscent of Condo's work.
I was also drawn to the geometric facial composition of the subject in Condo's 'The Cracked Cardinal', 2004, and was inspired to pick out distinctive facial features using lines and geometric shapes in my own portrait experiments. I also decided to pursue the paper folding technique I had experiment with earlier in the project and use it to create a geometric, cubic portrait evocative of Condo's. Overall the exhibition inspired my project greatly as now I have narrowed the focus of my project to look at facial distortion and embellishment using geometric patterns.
No comments:
Post a Comment