ART CITIES:N.York-Jonas Wood
Known for his colorful and compressed depictions of the people, places, and things that populate his daily life in Los Angeles, Jonas Wood creates works that bear clear traces of his biography in both form and content. The intimate settings invoke the work of forebears such as Henri Matisse and David Hockney, yet his distorted verdant rooms possess an affectless cut-out appearance all his own.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Jonas Wood presents is solo exhibition “Four Tennis Courts”. Wood first made use of sports imagery in dynamic post-Pop portraits derived from boxing, baseball, and basketball cards—tokens that have as much to do with celebrity as nostalgia. He later became interested in depicting the physical spaces associated with sports. While watching games on television, Wood developed a shorthand approach to representing courts and fields, paring complex scenes down to geometric shapes and flat, saturated colors. In the oil and acrylic canvases on view, he reworks four of his favorite drawings from a suite of twenty-four produced between 2016 and 2018, all of which depict famous international tennis tournaments. Using televised events as reference, Wood foregrounds the strikingly abstract nature of tennis court design; he renders each site large scale and in portrait format, preserving its key characteristics while drastically simplifying, or eliminating altogether, the players and spectators. The courts: in Abu Dhabi, London, Melbourne, and Paris; are distinguished by their iconic colors and identifying signage. The chromatic density and richness of these works stands in contrast to the simplicity of their composition. “Wimbledon with Bball Orchid” (2021) and “French Open with Orchid” (2021) incorporate snippets of paintings of plants and basketballs, hinting at the studio space beyond the screen, while “Australian Open with Red Lines” (2021) and “Abu Dhabi” (2021) feature strategically positioned abstract elements, with bars of red and black recalling postwar Color Field painting. Together, the quartet forms a Grand Slam in which the rigors of professional athletic competition are displaced by deft visual play. With one foot rooted in Analytic Cubism and the other in Contemporary Pop art, Jonas Wood is an artist who bridges two seemingly disparate traditions to create paintings that present contemporary life from multiple perspectives. Born in Boston and now living and working in Los Angeles, Wood took a somewhat circuitous route to becoming a professional artist, even considering pursuing a PhD in psychology before deciding on an MFA in painting. His work still contains subtle psychological elements, tying together elements of the past and the present, either through empty but intimate interiors or through other paintings of contemporary American life. Wood’s use of color in his embracement of quotidian domestic settings calls to mind David Hockney’s dreamlike depictions of suburban subjects. Though not inherently mathematical in composition, the artist’s paintings often contain numerous intersecting geometrical elements, as objects and patterns become flattened in his artistic process, which involves creating drawings of photographs of his subjects that eventually serve as the primary models for his paintings. In creating artworks from the items and environments around him, whether they are sports imagery, animals, or furniture, Wood extracts the beauty from the ordinary, proving that there’s more to the everyday than meets the eye.
Photo: Wood Kusaka Studios, Los Angeles, 2021, Artwork © Jonas Wood. Photo: Marten Elder, Courtesy the artists and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 2/6-16/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com
