Condo’s formative European travels eventually brought him to Paris where he remained until 1995. It was from his encounters with European painting that Condo embarked upon a series of ‘fake Old Master’ portraits that rampaged through the archives of art history, harnessing the pictorial languages of Velázquez, Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso.
In this most recent instalment of Condo’s work the focus turns to drawing, a medium that is omnipresent throughout his oeuvre. For Condo, drawing allows for a gestural freedom and immediacy that lends itself to abstraction. Working from thousands of sketchbooks, these new works on paper reveal the intensity of Condo’s relationship to drawing which first became evident in his series of ‘Expanding Canvases’ (1984-1986) where he translates the spontaneity of drawing into painting; the surfaces teem with visual references that casually float free of definition as one form feeds into the next. For example, in Internal Constellation (2001), a later large-scale work on paper, the surface is densely packed with small figures, suggestive of a horror vacui - there is no obvious break in the pencil lines that at once delineate nude female forms and decapitated miniature heads with bulging eyes and gnashing teeth. Condo’s cartoon-like images, tangled together with what Laura Hoptman termed as ‘Picassoid’ figures, denote a field of cultural reference that draws not only from art history but from pop culture, from music and graffiti. These 'psychological landscapes' as Condo describes them, reflect a profound love of drawing; regardless of the medium, whether it is oils, pastel or pencil, in Condo’s work, every line is ‘drawn’.
