Beschreibung:

George Condo Cartoon Abstraction 2010 acrylic, charcoal on linen 78 x 108 in. (198.1 x 274.3 cm.) Signed and dated "Condo 2010" on the reverse.
Provenance Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris Exhibited Paris, Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, George Condo – Cartoon Abstractions, March 31 - May 26, 2010 Literature George Condo – Cartoon Abstractions, exh. cat., Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris, 2010, pp. 28-29 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay "That’s why I work with a cast of characters, all created carefully. As each of them becomes real, so do their environments, their place of being. Sometimes, I think they even come from some imaginary character’s mind.” GEORGE CONDO 1992 The present lot, Cartoon Abstraction, from 2005, inspired by cartoon characters from the imagination of Tex Avery and the wildly successful Hanna-Barbera toons in the Golden Age of Hollywood, portrays at once a lively and playful duo obfuscated and inverted with wickedly miscreant alter egos. Condo gathered his inspiration from the plentiful and splashy iconography of cartoons which in their own era mirrored both a world being rebuilt and expanded in the wake of the Second World War. Exalted as a link between the figurative practice commenced by Picasso straying to the acutely abstracted Woman I of Willem de Kooning into the transcendental realm of contemporary painting, Condo scrupulously attenuates his figures, forms, and techniques from a boundless sweep of art history, markedly from Pop and Cubism but hugely indebted to Old Masters as well. His richly pictorial works have cemented him as one of the most creative, if not perplexing, artists of our time. Punctuated with pastels perforating the foreground, the present lot is a visual carnival of wayward surrealism, operating at a delicate intersection among abstraction, subjectivity, geometry and illusion. His technique enables him to realize tremendous freedom in the composition of the canvas and the application of the paint. Aligning with his archetypal deformed portraits of the female nude, his cartoons are rendered as anamorphic to a degree. The lines are sketchy, colors ooze outside their linear bounds and, in certain fields of the canvas, individual details of the characters are duplicated in varying arrangements, contorted or slung over each other. Condo leaves intact the initial black outlines of the figures that not only serve as the formal inception of the central matter but also extend outwards to create an abstract configuration immersing the remainder of the canvas. Disjointed portrayals of the characters reimagined by the artist suggest spontaneity through the joint effort of dusty, sparse charcoal and the constructive use of paint. As Condo once explained, “It’s about dismantling one reality and constructing another form the same parts” (J. Higgie, “Time’s Fool,” Frieze Magazine, May 2007). Cartoon Abstraction is markedly an epitome of this manufactured movement of artificial realism, in that the artist illustrates a realistic portrayal of the artificial. As cartoons are a true product of part pure imagination and part cultural framework, their realistic aspects too are a function of the perspective in which they are considered. Moreover, the present lot highlights a newfound evolution in the artist’s idiom, a fascination with and a craving for a chronicle of generic American imagery through the lens of his mental states. Through these means, his portraits not only reveal the dual nature of humanity but also disclose and analyze the stereotypes to which we adhere. By choosing to represent cartoons developed in the 1950s and 1960s, moments in American history in which cultural identity was being reshaped, Condo disassembles beliefs, so emphasizing the influence of mass media in the culture of a nation. As Tim Teeman once described it, “He likes these works of ‘artificial realism’ to shock, ‘but not negatively; these paintings put the pieces of a shattered life together, not shatter a life.’ (T. Teeman, “George Condo: ‘I would love to do a Prince Charles in full regalia holding a daisy’, The Times, October 8, 2011). In displacing the cartoons