GEORGE CONDO: THE MAD AND THE LONELY
Reasons to be cheerful (and existential) in the summer art season.
The Athens, Greece-based DESTE Foundation just opened George Condo’s meaty, madly surreal visual fever dream in an old butchery factory. Welcome to Hydra’s powerhouse of art energy Hellenistic-style.
An insanely rapturous range of small-scale paintings and sculptures, titled ‘The Mad and the Lonely,’ by George Condo, is now open to view at the old Slaughterhouse. This primal artwork will pop your psyche and expand your consciousness in a multitude of ways. Condo’s captivating pieces are an extraordinary exploration of intimacy, alienation and emotional volatility so jam packed that they will jolt you into various states of hypersensitivity and meta-awareness.
Housed in this mythical and ancient venue, the exhibit exudes all the paradoxes and issues of post-modern life and art. The show poses many critical and compelling questions. Are we all secretly demented or insane to some degree? Are we so fragile and lonely that any and everything represents an existential tipping point? Condo is pointing out that we are all souls trapped in ordinary/vulnerable bodies that engage in a lifelong, minute-by-minute ontological struggle session.
The human condition is an intense battleground of everyday tasks, social tensions, change and uncomfortable circumstances that compel us to survive and strive (or wither away). Condo investigates this moving matrix of fear/greed/pleasure/pain/uncertainty and anarchy. How do we respond to all these dualisms, conundrums and binary outcomes? How do we process our complex emotions, thoughts, interactions and metaphysical contingencies?
These deep queries correspond to the awesome output of the New York-based virtuoso – a surging painterly guru of all things existential and neo-surreal. George Condo has been tearing up the art scene for years with his wild-style visuals, mind-warping multimedia and humanoid-like portraits that transport viewers to varied psychic dimensions. His work is a worthy investment if you can $$ cover it and has been on an upward valuation trajectory in recent times.
Perhaps the characters/forms in Condo’s crazy stylized cosmos are engaged/enraged in their own undulating and iffy existence, embodying all the extreme agitation, internal anarchy and psychic WTF that we all experience day to day? It is as if he thrusts us into a kookie domain of psychological Cubism and visual string theory – a quantum tunnel of otherworldly technique and modern world whimsy in the 14th dimension.
Condo brilliantly delves into his own experiences and interests via new modes of Cubism, Surrealism and myriad ancient works. He overlays his art with Greek, Renaissance and Baroque motifs, highlighting art historical references to works from Michelangelo, Socrates, Aristotle, Thales and other classical/ancient big dogs.
He uses his mediums to explore different emotional and subjective states – mental, physical and otherworldly. His depiction of frenetic motion, objects, people, expressions, and the nature of being are a major eye-opener. Portraying disfigured forms, distorted body parts, cartoon-y people and random everything, Condo gives us a deeply haunting perspective of the species and the interstitial spaces between fantasy, reality and freaky psychic realms. But this art makes you feel and think profoundly about things, people and the world around us. It is weirdly alchemical and highly informative.
Themes of vulnerability and loneliness are recurring in this body of work, as well as Condo’s powerful take on human subjectivity, the variability of perception and the multiplicity of man. Overall, you can sense and emote many different things simultaneously by zoning in to Condo’s beautifully-twisted creatures conjured from his mad-cool, multilayered skewed imagination: happiness and grief, sweetness and evil, chaos and comfort, order and disorder.
This exhibit is a f*^king excellent, well curated psycho-emotional volcano. It is actually a reason to be cheerful in this season of scorching hot uncertainty. 'The Mad and the Lonely' is on view until October 31st at Project Slaughterhouse Hydra, Greece. Go there!
