ART CITIES: N.York-Jonas Wood
In his boldly colored, graphic works, including paintings, drawings, and prints, Jonas Wood combines art historical references with images of the objects, interiors, and people that comprise the fabric of his life. Translating the three-dimensional world around him into flat color and line, he confounds expectations of scale and vantage point.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
The works on view in Jonas Wood solo exhibition “Prints 2” feature his perennial motifs (plants, pottery, portraiture, interiors, landscapes, and basketball) reflecting the life of the artist through representations of home, studio, and natural spaces. They are united by Wood’s transformation of subject matter into images with skewed planar space, dense patterning, and vivid color. Developing his prints in parallel with his paintings, Wood has arrived at linked practices that continually inform one another. Emphasizing the collaborative aspect of printmaking, Wood works with masters of traditional methods who have made innovative contributions to the field. The stylistic diversity of Wood’s prints results from his experimentation with pictorial effects, processes, and materials, effectively exploring the genre of printmaking itself. The methods used to produce the works in Prints 2 include hard-ground and soft-ground etching, lithography, screen printing, and woodcut, as well as various hybrid processes. Wood pairs these techniques with variations in mark making, color, texture, and density to harness and reveal the characteristics unique to the medium. “Four Landscapes” (2020), a suite of woodcuts made with a Japanese ukiyo-e technique, depicts scenes that invoke winter, spring, summer, and fall. Between twelve and twenty hand-carved blocks were used to produce each work’s vibrant colors and interlocked forms, giving these prints an uncanny resemblance to Wood’s use of gouache in his drawings. An edition of large-scale prints, “4 Seasons” (2022), portrays four pairs of basketballs, revisiting a body of work from 2010 and representing the seasons of the year-round sport. Wood’s investigations into the compositional possibilities of printmaking culminate with “Kitchen Interior: (2022), a 112-color screen print made over twenty months that combines views of the landscape with a detailed interior enlivened by plants and aspects of domestic life. Imagery from one work often appears in others, highlighting the ways in which Wood’s ideas go through these several phases of development. In some paintings, he establishes anachronous juxtapositions, inserting family members into images he finds on the internet or compiling entirely fictional scenes out of otherwise factual elements drawn from diverse sources. What unifies these diverse elements are Wood’s increasingly nuanced approaches to color and paint application. While many of the paintings are notable for their saturated hues and bold forms, they all contain innumerable instances in which less immediately perceptible decisions play key roles in the paintings’ overall effect. Woven throughout some pictures, for instance, are carefully modulated grey and neutral tones that generate palpable volume. Each of these characteristics reveals Wood’s project to be one in which craft and process go hand-in-hand with psychological connection and overall pictorial vision. They also demonstrate the artist’s breadth and curiosity: he employs various types of printmaking to create a range of effects and moods, and experiments with varying approaches to layering and foreground/background distinctions.
Photo Left: Jonas Wood, Kitchen Interior, 2022, 112-color screen print on Rising museum board, 48 ¼ × 31 ½ inches (122.6 × 80 cm), edition of 60 + 14 AP, © Jonas Wood, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Right: Jonas Wood, Dog-Faced Purple Orchid, 2022 41-color lithograph on white Rives BFK paper, 31 ¼ × 24 inches (79.4 × 61 cm), edition 1 of 40, © Jonas Wood, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 26/1-25/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
