Jonas Wood on Flatness, Family Life, and Cartoon Comparisons

'I want to feel deeply connected to it' the artist says of his work. 'If it’s meaningful to me, hopefully it will convey energy out into the world and connect with people.'

by Emily Steer October 10, 2024 ShareShare This Article

Jonas Wood richly entangles art and life. The U.S. painter’s eponymous new exhibition at Gagosian (Grosvenor Hill, London, until November 23) is littered with references to his family, Los Angeles studio, and home. In Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks (all paintings 2024), the American artist’s wife and two children are part concealed by giant fronds, with their eyes poking out humorously through small holes. 10 Pigeon Hill Road transports viewers back in time, revealing Wood’s childhood home in characteristically disjointed form, with the wall and ceiling appearing ready to cave inwards. His two pet dogs, past and present, are brought lovingly together in Robot and Bear.

His paintings are loaded with furniture, plants, and references to other artists’ work, including ceramics by his wife Shio Kusaka. While Wood doesn’t place singular importance on the personal significance of his settings and subjects—he is just as interested in the paintings’ formal concerns— these tender expressions of his own life convey a palpable sense of warmth. “I put a lot of emotion into all of the work,” the artist said in an interview with Artnet News. “I want to feel deeply connected to it. If it’s meaningful to me, hopefully it will convey energy out into the world and connect with people.”

Installation view “Jonas Wood.” Artwork © Jonas Wood. Photo: Maris HutchinsonCourtesy Gagosian.

Some pieces contain more subtle threads to his inner world, devoid of people or belongings. Chelsea, for example, is a detailed cityscape of New York’s iconic red brick buildings which reflects on his first major exhibition in the city. For Wood, the piece captures the excitement of first making it as an artist. Even without this specific backstory, the painting conjures the highly recognizable side of Manhattan that many young people will have hoped of one day realizing their dreams in.

Jonas Wood, Self-Portrait with Home Depot Cart, Joint, and Phone (2024) © Jonas Wood. Photo: Marten Elder, courtesy Gagosian.

A new painting, Self-Portrait with Home Depot Cart, Joint, and Phone, addresses his own embodied experience, following recent weight loss. The piece depicts the artist hidden amongst an abundance of house plants and books, almost blending into the patterned wall behind him. “It is about my fears and anxieties and having body dysmorphia,” he said. “I’ve always lived in this fat guy’s body and wanted to not be in it. I’m hiding behind the things that represent me as an artist. It’s a very fun self-portrait, but there’s a deeper insecurity about myself that I put into it.”

Wood is a prolific painter. He works from a mass of source material that is saved in his archive and often returns to the same motifs. The artist doesn’t paint from life, but from a selection of preparatory drawings and photographs. Chelsea was first formed as a collage in 2009, before he eventually translated it to canvas for this exhibition. “I don’t really believe in writer’s block or painter’s block,” he considered. “I want to be in a continuous flow state.” When looking beyond the recognizable forms in the work, his paintings can be read in a more abstract way. His recurring motifs are a vehicle for explorations in line, pattern, and form, and even when offering a fragmented sense of perspective, his works retain a certain flatness.

Installation view “Jonas Wood.” Artwork © Jonas Wood. Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian.

The decisive lines of paint in Wood’s pieces mimic and enlarge the original pencil lines of his drawings. He maps out the bigger shapes or objects in the canvas first, before populating these with smaller items. “I’m not an action painter, I don’t roll up to a blank canvas and start painting this spontaneous idea,” he said. “I’m more like a builder, an architect or a contractor. I have to build the foundation to then accentuate the details on top it. There is a lot of play in the painting. I’m extrapolating information from the source image but then mark making and expressing myself on top of those foundations I’ve already built.”

At times, the framework of the paintings come to the fore. Japanese Garden with Temple sees a host of competing patterns, lines and shapes jostling against one another. “Part of the intention was to paint a landscape, but also to force all these different pattern types against each other,” he said. In 10 Pigeon Hill Road, the conflicting lines of perspective convey how wonky and fragmented human sight is. “I think the eye sees things from a variety of perspectives. Our views are quite off-kilter. I like to lean into that and I look for images that have that. These works are plastic, they’re not real. It’s an abstract, complicated experience.”

Jonas Wood, Miami Shade House (2024). © Jonas Wood. Photo: Marten Elder, Courtesy Gagosian.

The works do indeed complicate classical medium distinctions. On close inspection, his marks reveal themselves as painterly, but there is a graphic feel to his thick lines and jagged patterns when viewed from a distance. “My work’s been compared to ‘South Park’ and ‘The Simpsons,’” he laughed. “I got my kids some old 1990s video games, and they were like, ‘Your paintings kind of look like Nintendo’. Animation is quite flat. It’s made from cells stacked with limited information. I similarly always wanted to paint things quite detailed with limited tools: marks, lines, shapes, that’s it. Very little shadow, very little rendering around something. I think the limitations in my work lead to those comparisons. The simplicity of the way I approach certain aspects of painting is almost like X’s and O’s.”

Wall of Fame, the only painting situated in the gallery’s entrance, is a fusion of all his influences. It reflects upon the close creative bonds he has with his children, recreating a wall in their own home which is covered in art they have made of or for him. Amongst them is an expressive portrait of Wood; a recreation of his daughter’s drawing of an original Picasso; and a volcanic landscape painting. It is a celebration of both the figurative and abstract; the personal and formal.

“It’s kind of a self-portrait,” he said. “It has a still life, a landscape, and a portrait. It’s all in here: color, flatness, patterning. It’s also for the viewer to understand how I collect things. It has everything I like about painting but it’s also about my family, my relationship with my kids. They loved it, they helped me work on it. I think it’s an oddball painting, but it encompasses who I am.”

“Jonas Wood” is at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, through November 23.

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