T owering and impressing the viewer through a play of multi-dimensionality, Jonas Wood’s Clipping A3 illustrates the artist's signature deployment of an array of formal techniques to create viewpoints that are at odds with the viewer’s expectations. Wood's plants and clippings are are the quintessence of his painterly lexicon– that is, figurative paintings that take form amidst abstraction, and vice versa. The red and yellow orchid stems through a partial area across the negative space of the large-scale canvas, a gesture making us, as Matisse did in the 20th century with his interiors, more aware of vertical space as Clipping A3 recalls a houseplant placed on a shelf or table. With this we become acutely aware of Wood’s manipulation of perspective, at once alluding while collapsing Renaissance ideals of the practice. Blocky leaves give way to vibrantly-hued blossoms and are flanked by roots which expand out into the composition in opposite soft tones of white and gray. With it's grand scale and geometric nature, the work is a standout representation of the plant motif in Wood’s larger body of work.

The interplay of representational space and abstracted form in Clipping A3 is exemplified by the orchid’s geometric composition; flattened against the picture plane, the work acts as a self-contained rendering akin to a television screen or photograph. Working from reference materials that includes photographs and clippings, the artist has explained his beginning stages of his painting as based on a process akin to collage-making. “Step one, in many ways,” he says, “ is like editing or manipulating some photos or making a photo collage and then deciding if it can translate to the next step. I’m all about scissors and glue, very limited computer stuff. Somet.mes s I stretch and distort things, but most of the t.mes I cut and paste until I’m happy (Jonas Wood, in conversation with Brian Sharp in: Jonas Wood Paintings and Drawings, p. 7).”

Wood’s turn towards the plant as the subject originated “as a means to start painting from life (Jonas Wood, in conversation with Corrina Peipon in: Jonas Wood: New Plants, p. 6).” Known for his depiction of the interiors, people, and objects around him, Wood offers an acute portrayal of his direct environment. Stark coloring and flat amorphic shapes have been hallmarks of his work for the last two decades, and Clipping A3 exemplifies his ability to manipulate everyday objects in his work, translating the three-dimensional objects into highly stylized, blockish forms.

The artist's foray into depictions of plants and still lifes are very much connected to it's art historical tradition, something which on a personal level was deeply entrenched in the artist’s life from a young age. Jonas Wood’s grandfather was a collects or and amateur painter, and from him Wood inherited several works which includes a gouache by Alexander Calder and a print by Henri Matisse, two figures from whom Wood has said to have drawn much inspiration. Stylistically, Wood’s work seems to combine a play on interiors and dimensionality directly linked to that of Matisse’s, and a turn to abstraction of forms that the artist has recognized as stemming from a fascination with Alexander Calder’s oeuvre. “I took some of the [Calder] sculptures I saw in books and tried to make them match this plant aesthetic that I was building (Ibid., p. 7).”

Wood has also said that there is a lightness in Calder’s paradoxically metal sculptures which has captured him, something he seems to have translated into his own work, particularly in the Clippings. In them, he often portrays expressive varieties of plants with much pattern and color, however all the while in a signature understated flatness that makes use of negative space as if to visually highlight the de-contextualized nature of his collage-like process. This process is again directly evocative of Henri Matisse, most notably by way of the late master’s famous cut-outs completed near the end of his life. Due to compromised physical health, in the last decade of Matisse’s life, the artist began cutting up gouache-painted paper into a wide range of shapes and rearranging them into new compositions.

Likening Wood’s singular artistic project to Henri Matisse’s, art historian Ken D. Allan states: “In 1908 Henri Matisse explained, ‘The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive...Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s disposal to express his feelings.’ Wood’s return to such questions allows us to see that painting’s delivery of visual pleasure has a history—a history that Wood’s work surely continues.” (Ken D. Allan in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist in: Exh. Cat., Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Jonas Wood, 2019, pp. 22-23)

But it is not only in form that Wood’s work is connected to that of Matisse, himself saying: “it isn’t so much the lightness of [his] paintings that I responded to - it’s the patterns and the colors, the heavy patterning" (Jonas Wood in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Jonas Wood, p. 92). Through various explorations both of individual motifs de-contextualized from their respective environments to elaborate interiors that incorporate people and personal objects and relationships, pattern is ever-present throughout Wood’s career and serves as a powerful choice in work that is centered around juxtaposition and layering. His interest in pattern itself, other than from a personal and familial relationship with art history, comes also from his direct experience of an artistic process that draws on the line as it relates to the etching, which he applies onto his work as another layer created from memory. On this he has said:

Moreover, drawing on and uniting many of the most important elements of Jonas Wood’s oeuvre, Clipping A3 thus epitomizes his aesthetic project, and sees the artist drawing heavily upon the art of his forebears to create a work that is resolutely modern and monumental in scale.

Artist

Jonas Wood