GEORGE CONDO
Though best known for his fiercely
wacky portraits, the American artist
George Condo is as much a portraitist
as he is an abstract
expressionist. “I
love the idea of two incompatible worlds brought
together—opposing forces harmonically melded,” he says. When he met
Chastain, his plan was to create
two artworks—and cast her not as their
subject but as a character in them.
“I wanted Jessica to become part of
the painting and then appear to come off it,
as if she were breaking
free and leaving behind an empty space,” he says. “I liked that the
paintings were 3-D.” To achieve that effect, Condo designed two simple
canvas dresses for Chastain, taping them to the canvas and painting over
them so that when they were removed, they would leave a blank space but
appear to be a fragment of the piece. Standing in front of Condo's Abstract Conversations, 2012, with her red hair teased to eternity, Chastain
blended into the cacophony of line and color, a member of the loopy
crew. As Condo studied Chastain posing next to the other figures in the
work, he began drawing a cluster of noisy characters close to her head
to give the impression “that they were yelling into her ear.” While
Chastain was having white makeup applied to half her face, Condo grabbed
a scrap of paper and created an eye for her to use as a prop. “I thought
if she just held it in front of her, it would give a real sort of
Stanley Kubrick feel to the experience.” The result, of course, is
suitably schizoid, just as Condo envisioned. “With that popped-out eye,
there are two different sides to her face: one hysterical and the other
soulful,” he says. “Multiple emotions at the same time.”
RINEKE DIJKSTRA
There’s a breathtaking intensity to Rineke Dijkstra’s videos and large
color portraits, perhaps owing to the way the Dutch artist and her
subjects lock eyes and dare the viewer to look away. Dijkstra, whose
midcareer survey earlier this year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art and at New York’s Guggenheim Museum won critical raves, focuses on
people poised on the cusp of change: adolescents on the beach, mothers
clutching newborns, bloodied bullfighters. Her subjects are aware of the
camera but not practiced at manipulating whom
it sees. Unlike them, of
course, Jessica Chastain is well-versed in the art of presenting
herself. Still, for Dijkstra, the process is always the same. Working
with a 4x5 format camera,
she places her subjects against a nondescript
backdrop and waits for something to happen. “There has to be an
interaction for the photograph to work,” Dijkstra says. “We have to
be
interested in each other.” Intrigued by Chastain’s porcelain-pale skin,
Dijkstra wanted to shoot her wearing subdued colors that set off her red
hair and blue eyes. But beyond
the palette, the artist didn’t know what
she was going to do until she and Chastain met in the studio. “I always
work from observation and try to capture something from the clues I
get,” notes Dijkstra, a master at conveying psychological nuance. “If
you plan everything, there’s no room for interpretation. And Jessica was
really open. She wasn’t hiding.”
