Jonas Wood, “Kitchen on Palms,” 2008
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Post-War & Contemporary Art Afternoon Session
New York | 16 November 2017
Original Listing
“Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Calder, Monet, Vuillard, Bonnard, van Gogh, Stuart Davis, and Hockney have all been very real influences to me. When I was a young child, my family would speak about these artists as examples of greatness in painting. I guess even then I took them seriously because these are the artists I ended up fashioning my studio practice after.” (J. Wood, quoted in E. Tovey, “Jonas Wood,” Dossier Journal, April 3, 2012).
“More than ever his works negotiate an uneasy truce among the abstract, the representational, the photographic and the just plain weird. They achieve this with a dour yet lavish palette, tactile but implacably workmanlike surfaces and a subtly perturbed sense of space in which seemingly flattened planes and shapes undergo shifts in tone and angle that continually declare their constructed, considered, carefully wrought artifice." (R. Smith, "Art in Review: Jonas Wood," The New York Times, March 18, 2011).
An important proponent of contemporary figurative painting, Jonas Wood creates exquisitely detailed visions of the everyday world. Kitchen on Palms is an archetypal Wood canvas. Painted in 2008, the same year as his second solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, it brings together his signature themes and planar style in a tightly conceived image of a foliage-rich household. The focal point of the work is a grouping of potted plants and ceramic vessels which figure prominently into Wood’s oeuvre. Inspired stylistically by the California paintings of David Hockney, Wood updates the former’s cool compositions with a near-Cubist sensibility. Roberta Smith, writing about a 2011 exhibition, noted, “More than ever his works negotiate an uneasy truce among the abstract, the representational, the photographic and the just plain weird. They achieve this with a dour yet lavish palette, tactile but implacably workmanlike surfaces and a subtly perturbed sense of space in which seemingly flattened planes and shapes undergo shifts in tone and angle that continually declare their constructed, considered, carefully wrought artifice" (R. Smith, "Art in Review: Jonas Wood," The New York Times, March 18, 2011). Twisting the perspective of his deftly assembled tableaus, Wood pushes the viewer into his constructed world.
At once a domestic interior and a study in space, Kitchen on Palms is a collection of flat planes resembling a room. Half of the space is given over to bare white walls that strike a balance with the densely-populated kitchen table. A variety of houseplants, all in delicately rendered ceramic pots, create a forest of green that anchors the center of the painting while also leading the eye toward the rest of the composition via dangling leaves and creeping vines. The skewed perspective and Cubist-inspired handling of form is obvious, and indeed Wood comments at length on his indebtedness to his artistic forebearers. “Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Calder, Monet, Vuillard, Bonnard, van Gogh, Stuart Davis, and Hockney have all been very real influences to me. When I was a young child, my family would speak about these artists as examples of greatness in painting. I guess even then I took them seriously because these are the artists I ended up fashioning my studio practice after” (J. Wood, quoted in E. Tovey, “Jonas Wood,” Dossier Journal, April 3, 2012). This admission of influence also helps with a reading of Wood’s work as sudden art historical references and tropes spring forward where once was only an ordinary scene. Knowing a space intimately allows the artist to transform its small quirks into hotspots for visual interest. Spending time with one of Wood’s works will reward the viewer with more and more insight into the artist’s world. In Kitchen on Palms, the majority of the focus resides within the various flora in the central plane, but a deeper reading will draw the eye to a small black and white work hanging above the table, the barely discernible open door against the white wall, and the sharp, simple shape of the clothes iron in the far background. All of these objects are in crisp relief against their surroundings thanks to Wood’s immaculate handling.
Known for his interiors like Kitchen on Palms, Wood is a master of the quotidian. His vibrant reimaginings of the mundane scenes of everyday life are culled from the artist’s surroundings: rooms in his house, basketball cards, a local street, and people he knows. “Of all the possible things I could paint, the thing that interests me is something that I can get close enough to in order to paint it honestly. The painters whose work means the most to me—that’s what they were painting. It was their loved ones or the stuff that was in their house. It was always this hyperpersonal thing to me” (J. Wood, quoted in D. Nadel, Jonas Wood: Interiors, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 56). Mainly working from photographs, both appropriated and taken by the artist, the level of detail in each of Wood’s works hints at the amount of visual information held in these reference images. Furthermore, by combining different points of perspective into one illusionary amalgam, Wood is able to create an undulating, crystalline vision of domesticity. The way in which certain objects seem to be cut off (the abruptly ending cacti in Kitchen on Palms is an excellent example) or the fact that spaces suddenly change from foreground to background without transition bring up visual references to photographic borders and cropped out areas. However, instead of throwing the composition into disarray, the disjointed appropriation comes together under Wood’s masterful arrangement.
Born in Massachusetts in 1977, Wood received his MFA from the University of Washington before moving to Los Angeles where he now lives and works. Wood’s depiction of California is both familiar and distorted as the sun-bleached rooms and lush foliage are filtered through his own fragmentary style. Drawing parallels to the crisp forms and stylistic tendencies of artists like Hockney, Alex Katz, and Lucian Freud, Wood’s emphasis on flat planes of color and even light create a tension as the depicted scenes flit between two and three dimensions. Kitchen on Palms is a stellar example of Wood’s fragmentary rendering and definitively positions the artist within the art historical canon.