Condo New York Press 'Condo Moves In'

By locating his artistic ancestors in the Old Masters and early Modernists, Condo taps into a connection between abstraction and psychoanalysis. After all, it was in 1910 that Wassily Kandinsky painted "First Abstract Watercolour" and Sigmund Freud founded the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Abstraction allows for a painting to become more realistic in that it's not a representation. The paint(ing) gains an independence that representational painters could not achieve. Thus, early Modernists—Kandinsky and Malevich among them—rejected concrete form in favor of pure abstraction. But Condo inserts himself in a different tradition, recalibrating the methods and practices of Old Masters as well as Modernists.
If Modernism was a response to the societal upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, then Condo serves as a bellwether to the cultural schizophrenia that has permeated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Certainly his progeny (John Currin, Dana Schultz and Maurizio Cattelan, among them) have continued this exploration into a world mediated by capitalism as a foregone conclusion. Indeed, it's in the last 20 years that we see Condo's genius manifest in truly original portraiture of the meek and wild and generally criminally insane among us.