What’s the difference between graffiti and painting?  Can you paint (I mean, like Picasso and Rembrandt) on the outside of a building, and can you graffiti on canvas?  After seeing George Condo’s paintings at a fancy Upper East Side gallery I would answer no to both.

I’d never seen Condo’s work in person before, and what I’d seen of it online and in print made it look like very cool decorator art, the kind that sits beautifully in a large, lacquered, all-white interior.  But the canvases in the gallery, with powdery, not-quite-opaque, overlapping layers of charcoal, pastel and paint, have a bristling urban energy.  There are obvious references to cubism, cartoons, and pornography, but the paintings are really cityscapes.  There’s one particularly elegant one, in black and white, that looks like it captures the view outside a window, with a band of clouds sitting on top.  And there are graffiti-like colored ones which, in addition to the architecture of the city, suggest the patina of the city – grime, noises, voices, and violence.  After one of these paintings gets purchased and hung in a living room in Beverly Hills, what happens?  Does it dissolve into the interior design, or does it carry some of the city with it?  Maybe the power of graffiti is that it can’t be carted off.