Dancing to Miles

George Condo uses various art historical styles in his work, alluding to painters such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and Willem de Kooning. Condo asserts that all of these approaches to painting now exist at the same time, and that the discipline is defined not by its ability to invent, but by its ability to reconfigure and retool styles for new audiences. This early Condo work recalls the analytic spaces of cubism and the slow unraveling of this conceptual world through the paintings of de Kooning. The ultimate lesson of the work, however, is of frenzied existence, fraught with turbulence and decay. Miles Davis, referred to in the title, practiced a free-form jazz that spiraled in and out of structure. To dance to Davis is a symbol for difficulty. Condo finds metaphoric footing in jazz and a complexity in cubism mixed with pop art and conceptual critique.