Known for his tableaus of contemporary life festooned with potted plants, hanging baskets and other domesticated foliage, the Los Angeles-based artist Jonas Wood has the uncanny ability to infuse a seemingly simple subject with visual intrigue and dynamic presence. Executed in 2007, Night Plant, is effortlessly cool and abundantly chic. Against a backdrop of jet black, an infant Monstera Deliciosa (also known as Swiss Cheese plant) rendered in a lavish green palette, sprouts from a dour yet elegant shallow terracotta vessel.

Night Plant would later inform a painting in the artist’s Clippings series, first exhibited at the Lever Art collects ion in New York in 2013. Here, Wood extracted plants from pervious works, enlarging the motifs and eliminating superfluous details such as pots and surrounding context. Describings his methodology, the artist comments; "I'm presenting these forms in the same way that I would represent something like a pot on a table with a plant in it.... The table is gone and the floor plane is completely erased.... I am removing them from a painting and making them independent.... These plant paintings are exploring shape and repetition in the same way as Alexander Calder – through suspension in space” (Jonas Wood cited in: New York, Lever House Art collects ion, Jonas Wood: Clippings, 2013-14, online). Such a notion is certainly true for the present work, in which a refined and simplified form exists with only a touch of representation.

Working in traditional genre of still life, Wood joins a lineage that stretches from modern masters such as Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse to contemporary giants David Hockney and Alex Katz. Recalling his early influences, Wood remarks, “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” (Jonas Wood cited in: Emma Louise Tovey, ‘Jonas Wood’, Dossier Journal, 3 April 2012, online).

Indeed, Night Plant recalls the manipulated space of Cubism and the flatness of Matisse. However, one of the more direct references within Wood’s career is undoubtedly Hockney. Like his British predecessor’s iconic works, Wood draws influence from the California landscape (both interior and exterior) and employs the same compelling juxtapositions that give both his and Hockney’s work their beguiling yet uneasy sense of space. Building upon Hockney’s abstraction, Wood nevertheless sets himself apart by embracing crisp edges and an eschewal of traditional models of illusionistic space.

Rapidly rising to the top of the contemporary art scene, Wood’s creative output continues to mature impressively, gaining pictorial and psychological weight. That his first museum survey was held last year at the Dallas Museum of Art is a test.mes nt to the calibre of his artistic production and inimitable creative spirit.