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Sunday 16 February

Jonas Wood: Mapping the Augmented Everyday

Published on: 15 December 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 5 minutes

Jonas Wood’s compositions are like visual puzzles where each element is both autonomous and interdependent. Patterns interact, shapes interlock, and colors create rhythms and counterpoints.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I’m going to tell you about Jonas Wood, born in 1977 in Boston, an artist who does much more than simply paint potted plants in Californian interiors.

Let’s dive into his pictorial universe where flatness reigns supreme, a silent manifesto against the Albertian perspective that has dominated Western art for centuries. Wood aligns with the philosophical lineage of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who, in The Eye and the Spirit (1964), developed the revolutionary idea that perception is not merely a window to the world but an embodied, subjective, and fragmented experience. His fractured compositions, impossible perspectives, and layered patterns are not just formal games—they perfectly illustrate this phenomenology of perception, where our view of the world is always partial, fragmented, and reconstructed by our brain.

Wood’s paintings are like mental collages, memory reconstructions of lived spaces. He doesn’t paint what he sees but what he remembers seeing, feeling, and experiencing. These interiors with broken perspectives, objects floating in ambiguous spaces, and giant plants seemingly fed on Californian steroids form an intimate cartography of his daily life. But don’t be mistaken: behind the apparent pop simplicity of his works lies a profound reflection on the very nature of our perception of reality.

Take his still lifes of potted plants. At first glance, one might reduce them to mere botanical illustrations on steroids. But Wood does much more than document his indoor plant collection—he creates psychological portraits of these living beings that share his everyday space. Each leaf, each branch becomes an autonomous graphic element, as if the plant itself were decomposing and recomposing before our eyes. This approach echoes the theories of philosopher Henri Bergson on duration and memory, where the present is always imbued with the past, and each moment contains the totality of our lived experience.

Wood systematically transforms his photographic sources by filtering them through his memory and imagination. Colors become more vibrant, patterns more pronounced, and perspectives more unstable. It’s as if his paintings were controlled hallucinations, waking dreams where objective reality dissolves into a bath of subjective impressions. His interiors are as much mental spaces as physical ones, places where Euclidean geometry gives way to emotional geometry.

The way he treats everyday objects—vases, furniture, plants—recalls Giorgio Morandi’s approach but with a pop energy filtered through the lens of David Hockney and Alex Katz. However, whereas Morandi sought the silent essence of objects, Wood celebrates their loud presence, their ability to carry stories, memories, and emotions. His objects are never neutral—they are charged with an almost electric intensity, as if they were about to come to life and tell their story.

What’s interesting about his work is this ability to create images that function simultaneously as autobiographical documents and formal explorations. His family portraits, for example, are not mere representations of his loved ones—they are studies on how affective memory distorts and reconstructs our perception of those we love. Faces are flattened, bodies geometrized, the space around them fragmented into abstract patterns. And yet, paradoxically, these distortions seem to bring us closer to the emotional truth of these relationships.

Wood uses color as a psychological tool rather than a descriptive one. His greens are not those of nature but those of the memory of nature. His blues are electric, his reds vibrant, his yellows almost fluorescent. This artificial palette creates a critical distance from reality while intensifying our emotional experience of the images. It’s a subtle balance between distance and intimacy that gives his work its power.

His relationship with art history is fascinating. Wood doesn’t reference his sources reverently. He digests, transforms, and makes them his own with deliberate nonchalance. His work echoes Matisse in its treatment of patterns, Hockney in its approach to domestic spaces, and Stuart Davis in its graphic energy. But all this is filtered through his contemporary sensibility and his experience of 21st-century visual culture.

Critics like to compare him to Hockney, but this is a lazy comparison that fails to do justice to the specificity of his approach. While Hockney seeks to capture the physical sensation of space and light, Wood is more interested in how memory and imagination reconfigure our experience of the everyday. His spaces are not real places but mental constructions, psychological collages where time and space compress and expand according to the mysterious laws of memory.

One particularly interesting aspect of his work is his collaboration with his wife, ceramicist Shio Kusaka. The vases she creates become recurring characters in his paintings, creating a fascinating dialogue between volume and flatness, between real objects and their representations. It’s as if these vases were actors in a domestic theater, carrying stories and meanings that go beyond their simple utilitarian function.

Wood has this rare ability to make the ordinary extraordinary without falling into the spectacular or sensational. His paintings make us see the everyday world as if discovering it for the first time, with a mix of familiarity and strangeness that recalls the experience of déjà vu. This is precisely what makes his work so relevant to our time: it helps us rediscover the hidden magic in the most banal corners of our lives.

His compositions are like visual puzzles where each element is both autonomous and interdependent. Patterns interact, shapes interlock, and colors create rhythms and counterpoints. It’s a complex balance that always seems on the verge of breaking but miraculously holds, like a house of cards defying gravity.

The influence of his art-collector grandfather is evident in his approach to painting as a constant dialogue with art history. Growing up surrounded by works by Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol gave him an intuitive understanding of modernity that shines through in each of his canvases. But what’s remarkable is his ability to transform these influences into something deeply personal and contemporary.

His commercial success is undeniable—his works fetch staggering prices in the art market. In May 2019, Japanese Garden 3 sold for $4.9 million at Christie’s. But unlike some artists who become corrupted by success, Wood continues to explore his territory with integrity and curiosity intact. He doesn’t paint for the market; he paints to understand his own experience of the world.

Jonas Wood creates images that are simultaneously accessible and complex, personal and universal. He shows us that contemporary painting can be both pop and intellectual, decorative and conceptual, intimate and spectacular. In a world saturated with digital images, his paintings remind us of the unique power of painting to transform our perception of reality.

Reference(s)

Jonas WOOD (1977)
First name: Jonas
Last name: WOOD
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • United States of America

Age: 48 years old (2025)

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