Jonas Wood | Gagosian
“I think it happens to be that I have a broad audience right now,” the American painter Jonas Wood has said. “Maybe that’s not always the case, but the reason I paint is not for those people. I think it’s for my own mental health and for my own sort of goals as a painter, but I’m aware of the viewer.”
Well, the broad audience bit is definitely correct: Wood has been represented by mega-gallery Gagosian for several years, and has taken over its largest London space this autumn. But if it’s true he paints solely for himself, it’s a happy accident that the finished paintings are so appealing to so many.
Wood’s canvases are large. He uses flat, cartoony colours, in both oil and acrylic paint. He works from found photos of both interiors and exteriors. He employs what this show’s notes term “sly shifts of perspective”; his landscapes are oddly depthless, carefully clashing collages that somehow cohere, when viewed from a distance.
Chelsea (2024), pictured above, is the standout example from the London show. It’s immediately recognisable as an American city scene. The steel-framed, brick fronted apartment buildings, many adorned with a wall-mounted A/C unit, the puffs of smoke from roofs, the flat white sky. But look closely at the passages to the right, around the pink door and the scene fragments into senselessness. You step back again, a bit dizzy, but you keep looking.
The same is true of his scenes of studio shelves (leaning impossibly), an apartment interior (walls caving in on themselves), or some cute children in masks (a gigantic basketball looming in the background). All scenes of ordered banality; or I’m sure that was the case in the original source photos.
Wood then makes them subtly chaotic. And hooks us in the process.
Jonas Wood is at Gagosian (London). 07 October - 23 November 2024