The Return of Client No. 9

Bodies intertwine atop a lurid ground of cubist geometry in George Condo’s 2008 painting The Return of Client No. 9. In the present Dionysian canvas, Condo’s painting is at its strongest: toying with the interminable artistic pulls between abstraction and figuration, comedy and seriousness, art historicism and inventiveness. These contradictions are central to the artist’s practice, particularly his self-declared “psychological cubism,” where the painter renders multiple, concurrent psychological states in one canvas. With virtuous application of oil paint, Condo expertly constructs a cacophony of sensorial and formal experience.

The fleshy pink limbs of the fornicating figures are fragmented by thin, black lines that shoot from empty green bottles. A violent dynamism envelops the composition, with the diagonals of the geometric lines mirroring the directions of the weapons that impale the male subject. As if refracted through the prism of the orange background, the monstrous faces refuse a singular perspective, defiantly challenging the gaze of the viewer. Transmogrified by a thick application of oil paint, these characters become the psychological subjects of Condo’s masochistic comedy. The Return of Client No. 9 reveals Condo’s artistic impulse, where painting becomes the material vessel for psychoanalytic exploration.

An emergent figure in the 1980s New York art scene, Condo spent his early years working alongside seminal artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Like others in his generation, Condo sought a new mode of figuration. Rather than turning away from his predecessors, though, Condo used art historical reference as a central force in his painterly practice. Drawing from Old Master’s academicism, Impressionist perspective, Cubist geometry, and Contemporary graffiti, Condo developed an inimitable visual language that traces his career. In The Return of Client No. 9, this referentiality is abundant—Manet is in the gestural pink facture of the bodies and Picasso in their craned necks and fragmented faces; Guston is in the texturizing mark-making and Bacon in the fluorescent orange background and segmentation of space through black lines. In this hybridization of influence, Condo develops a brand new lexicon. The artist’s historical vocabulary portends a shiny, forward-thinking mode of painting.

Exhibited in the artist’s 2011 New Museum retrospective, George Condo: Mental States, the present work comes at a mature and renowned juncture of the artist’s prodigious career. While indebted to the history of painting, Condo is simultaneously invested in and observant of contemporary social circumstances. Particularly in the wake of the Great Recession of the late aughts, the artist turned his focus outward to real-life scandals. The present composition is a reference a New York Governor’s solicitation of an elite escort service. As curator and art historian Simon Baker notes, “despite his ferocious mid-coital expression, there remains something sympathetic about Client No. 9” (S. Baker, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 230). Impaled by various weapons and encased in a framework of Cubist splintering, the subject is treated at once with humility and parody. Amidst this frenzied public crucifixion, the exaggerative, comedic gesture of Condo’s vision undergirds his painting. Here, art historical reference becomes an interpretive lens through which to engage with the present.

The Return of Client No. 9 is a triumphant example of Condo’s idiosyncratic painterly language, where diametric opposites not only coexist but are fundamentally inextricable. In the antipodal psychological landscape of Condo’s oeuvre, painting is an act of observation, rebellion, and transformation. It is by engaging with the Western canon of portraiture that the artist is thereby able to dismantle it and develop something novel. In other words, rather than being freed from art history, Condo’s painting is freed by it.