George Condo,

whose exhibition at the Hayward Gallery I'm seeing tomorrow (excited), calls the bug-eyed creations within his paintings 'Pod people', after the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley's book 'The Doors of Perception'. When Ossian Ward interviewed Condo in 2007, the resultant article on this website - http://www.timeout.com/london/art/features/2572/George_Condo-interview.html - contained the following extract.

"All of these ‘Pods’ – including the Queen – wear an expression that ‘goes between a scream and a smile,’ says Condo, ‘that reflects simultaneous emotions or conversations with the conflicting voices in your head.’ This ‘psychological cubism’, as he calls it, parallels our ability to channel-hop through increasingly fractured visual information and ‘exploits our own imperfections – the private, off-moments or unseen aspects of humanity – that often give way to some of painting’s most beautiful moments’."

Food for thought.