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One of the best things about autumn’s museum schedules has been the ensuing, unofficial competition between painters Gerhard Richter, Wilhelm Sasnal and George Condo. Let’s call it ‘the ur-painter versus the er-painter versus the urgh-painter’. In this intergenerational contest, the smart money was always going to be on Condo (the urgh-painter, in case you’ve never seen one of his clever/dumb, abstract/figurative mash-ups) for delivering the most consistent visual pleasure, and ‘Mental States’, the Hayward’s 30-year survey of the fiftysomething American, doesn’t disappoint.
Let’s get the one sour note out of the way. Condo’s portraits of the Queen – nine of them are on show here – suck. Too deferential, bereft of the artist’s transformative powers, they show Condo to be a poor cartoonist in the traditional sense. His skill lies in turning types into believable presences just as, modelling forms in space, he turns brushstrokes into three-dimensional (and often grotesque) bodies. It’s through this process that the likes of ‘The Stockbroker’ (2002), his pants down and posing with a dowdy, pea-headed wife who covers his manhood with a limp doll, are given unexpected nuances of temperament and expression.
On paper it can seem as if there’s little more to Condo than exacting connoisseurship, a dark sense of humour and virtuoso touch. Despite the dubious honour of paving the way for the likes of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, he doesn’t offer up a neat career trajectory. Instead, we find ourselves scuttling back and forth through history, seeing reflected in Condo’s art the genius of Velàzquez, Goya, Picasso, Francis Bacon, Willem De Kooning and Arshile Gorky or the contributions of Picabia, Matta and late-period Derain, all parcelled up with the graphic stylings of Looney Tunes, Mad magazine’s Don Martin and R Crumb.
Yet, a Condo is undeniably a Condo, recognisable from 50 paces. In his hands painterly rhetoric becomes molten, cast into forms that, sometimes audacious and often ugly, always have something to say about the push-pull between art’s elevated status and baser human instincts. Hung salon-style, one wall in the Hayward is a rhythmic assembly that reveals his grand orchestration skills. The same sense of rhythm runs through graphic (in both senses of the word) works such as ‘Expanding Canvas’ (1985), in which doodles proliferate to fill endlessly suggestive ab-ex surround-scapes.
It’s there as well in the best of a selection of recent drawings on show at Sprüth Magers. These’ll put a spring in your step even if such a ‘timely’ (as the handout puts it) commercial exhibition causes you to pull a face that could be described as Condo-esque.