ART-PRESENTATION: Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood’s painting are influenced by a serious engagement with art history that ranges from Cubism to Pop Art, and are most notable for their reconsideration of the golden era of 20th Century American painting, drawing comparison to artists such as Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, and Stuart Davis. Working almost exclusively from life studies, sketches and collaged mock-ups, Wood’s distinctively humble aesthetic creates a disorienting sense of space.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

In his ongoing investigation of his intimate environment, Jonas Wood fuses artistic influences as diverse as the domestic interiors of Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and David Hockney to Chinese and Japanese still-life scenes, ancient pottery, and the guileless textiles of Josef Frank. Sampling subjects from his own photographs, he reiterates them through layered drawings, some of which he develops into paintings. Filling compressed picture planes with figures, plants, and household objects, Wood reimagines the world as a variegated collage of overlapping patterns, flatly rendered. Painted outlines of pots and vases, often based on the work of his wife Shio Kusaka and fueled by their shared interest in the history of ceramics, contain landscape and interior imagery, while verdant interiors possess an affectless cut-out appearance. In the exhibited drawings, Wood recycles “clippings” from his own paintings, still-life sketches and photographs of exotic plants and sets them into formal play. Patterned, overlapping petals and leaves coalesce into vibrant abstractions. Plucked from the context of their previously depicted maternal plants, sections of bromeliads, orchids and succulents become autonomous, unpredictable characters. Rendered in a bright palette or grayscale, close-up or suspended in space, they comprise a diverse garden of lyrical transformations.

Info: Eden Rock Gallery, Baie de Saint Jean, Saint Barthélemy, Duration: 28/12/15-31/1/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.gagosian.com