The Direct Citations (and Paraphrases) of Jonas Wood

Drenched in ravishing shades of red, the five captivating paintings of Jonas Wood that are mounted on the westernmost wall of Gagosian gallery on West 24th Street in Manhattan are nifty retellings of several specific paintings by Henri Matisse. There is, however, a dramatic shift from the highly painterly vernacular of Matisse to its somewhat opposite, where Wood stoically submits his well-defined outlines to clear-cut linearity and flattens surfaces through planarity, as a given section of a painting is primarily monochromatic. Astonishingly, the outcome of this antithetical transformation of Matisse does not entirely come across as un-Matissean, for if the observer were to go up close to the surface of the painting and witness the details of rendition of Wood’s discrete disegno, there is a sense of balance: here the calculation of design is firmly negotiated with the immediacy of the application of paint. Wood bewilderingly arbitrates the dichotomy of the Rubénistes that championed color and the Poussenistes that favored line, an aesthetic quarrel that takes us back to the discourses of Charles Le Brun and Roger de Piles in the seventeenth century. Whereas Le Brun characterized line as an agency to satisfy the mind while color was to render pleasure to the eye, de Piles favored color over line in two of his influential publications.[1] Although the paintings of Wood may appear to privilege linearity through his indisputable sharpness of contours, that strategy is nimbly exchanged with ample linear marks that proclaim the texture, raw materiality and autonomy of coloristic traces.

The riveting Romanian Blouse (1940) by Matisse of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in the Centre Pompidou in Paris appears as a tableau within an interior space formulated by such still life objects as floral arrangements, potted plants, fragments of furniture and a second, significantly abstracted tableau on the upper left side of Red Pot with White Blouse (2018) of Wood. Indeed, these pictorial elements of the interior space are extracted from the remarkable Large Red Interior (1948) by Matisse, also at the Centre Pompidou. Yet the set of vases and pots depicted here simultaneously echo the elegant porcelain and stoneware vessels created by Wood’s wife Shio Kusaka.[2] As this eye-catching simulacrum of Wood is pictorially contained within the silhouette of a red vase that is itself set within a light gray ground upon the canvas, mimesis and autobiography are unmistakably synthesized. While by no means are the artworks of Wood, Kusaka and Matisse tantamount, Red Pot with White Blouse renders them somewhat inseparable, intimate, mutual and capable of being shared by an audience.

Red Pot with Lute Player #2 (2018) of Wood is an emulation of the sensuous Lute (1943) of Matisse and transforms such terms as decoration, artmaking, originality and simulation into interchangeable concepts. Here Wood has edited The Lute, crystallizing its figures, objects and decorative motifs, as if to demonstrate the possibility of fusing the model of collage and the mediums of oil and acrylic in a manner that at once pays tribute to Matisse, Cubism and japonisme. These are evident through the pictorial flatness present upon the surface of the virtual pot and the contour of the pot as well, itself a palpable tribute to the artistic production of Kusaka who was born in Japan. Inasmuch as Wood retains the figural details of this painting of Matisse, there are overall and specific revisions of the original painting. Such alterations are manifested for instance through the facial expression of the lute player that has been further stylized or the seven yellow lemons depicted upon the tabletop that evoke a sense of perspective and a hesitation in it at the same time. Whereas the representations of lemons within the still-life section of the painting of Matisse are ethereal and come across as homages to the legendary lemons, apples and oranges of Paul Cézanne, Wood expands that history by treating his portrayal of lemons and almost all else represented upon the illusive vessel through various aspects of the distinct vocabulary of Roy Lichtenstein. The extraordinary Cubist Still Life with Lemons (1975) of Lichtenstein is one painting that is conjured up through this appositely calculated and masterfully executed painting of Wood. Hence Red Pot with Lute Player #2 incorporates a set of diverse art-historical referents, unceasingly expanding if not subverting the definition of the term appropriation. 

Through such remarkable paintings as Young Architect (2019), Inglewood Listing (2019), Still Life with Wood Panels (2018) and Jersey City Apartment (2019), Wood has transformed a given photograph into a painting, thereby editing and reconfiguring the imagery in order to highlight, for instance, the wood grains of the beams and panels of an architectural space under construction. Derived from a 1966 photograph, Wood depicts his father, an architect, in the upper center of the intricately detailed and absorbing painting Young Architect. As if it were a theatre of sunlight, timber and green foliage of trees, Young Architect comes across at once as a touching tribute to the artist’s father and the remaining elements that surround him, thereby imbuing the painting with a sense of the significance of life, the passage of time, its continuities and inescapable halts. Pictorial sensuality here frames mankind’s ontological quest. And yet the painting is also an equal tribute to the medium of photography (a direct, indexical citation of life) and the technique of painting based upon a photograph (a paraphrase of photography). And in between these two mediums is a series of other mediums that participate in the formation of the images of Wood, who appears to have embraced our postmodern condition and celebrates it through such paintings as Superhero Pot (2018) and Mickey and Minnie Mouse Frimkess Pot (2018), themselves explicit homages to Pop art. As these two paintings also signal to the oeuvre of the artist’s wife Kusaka through the silhouette of the vessel, along with likely references to their daughter Momo and son Kiki through popular icons, Wood liberally offers viewers the possibilities of expanding the boundaries of the autobiographical and collective, of mimesis (showing) and diegesis (telling), of direct citations and paraphrases.