Untitled

With its enigmatic and dreamlike conflation of imagery, symbolism and painterly technique, George Condo’s 1984 painting Untitled is an early example of the artist’s practice, celebrated for its disruptions and distortions of the traditional rules of painting. A surrealistic scene unfolds in this beguiling work: a jewel encrusted sword, its handle emblazoned with glistening rubies, lapis lazuli and gold, appears to plunge into the surface of the painting, creating cracks and grooves in its stony-painted façade. From out of these fissures spill two luxurious bejewelled necklaces, or perhaps rosary beads, in sapphire blue. At the base of the picture plane a newspaper bearing the inscription ‘CONTROL FINDINGS’ unfurls from yet another crevice. In the centre of the work, Condo has depicted a window-like opening which looks out on to blue skies and passing clouds. The wall’s ruptures, however, do not reveal the same celestial views but burn a deep and blood-like red, as if the stone has turned to flesh at the sword’s touch. Condo dexterously alludes to a multitude of artists, paintings and styles in this work: the Surrealist iconography of René Magritte’s iconic cloud paintings and Giorgio de Chirico’s hauntingly silent and shadowy arcades are echoed in his painterly forms; the work’s elaborate emblems seem to pastiche the ornate Vanitas and memento mori paintings of the great Dutch Masters; and, in both palette and the incorporation of text, the work seems influenced by the punk-oriented, wild styles of the German enfants terribles of the ‘80s, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, whose works Condo had admired in Cologne in 1983. In its masterful investigations of classical art history in a contemporary manner, Untitled gives a unique early insight into Condo’s complex riff on centuries of tradition, evoking the familiar to render the strange. In quite literally ‘controlling his findings’, Condo conveys a compelling visual metaphor in this entrancing artwork for peeling back the layers of art history to remodel and remake anew.