A towering display of his unique artistic vernacular, Untitled (Take 2) depicts a vibrant and towering monstera plant emerging from a terracotta pot, encompassing the viewer in the larger-than-life world of Jonas Wood. Anatomical and saturated while simultaneously geometric and aesthetically sharp, the present work encapsulates the familiar style and iconography of Jonas Wood’s lexicon, translating quotidian objects into highly stylised, blockish forms on a large scale. Executed in 2009, Untitled (Take 2) draws on and unites many of the most important and celebrated elements of Wood’s oeuvre, thus epitomizing the artist’s aesthetic project with serene vibrance on a monumental scale.

As an MFA student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Wood explored collage-based works, montaging photographs he took of himself, his friends, and their interior and exterior surroundings. The flatness of these early works persists in the pictorial flatness of his paintings and drawings today. In the surface of Untitled (Take 2), colour, depth and narrative are only visible in the contours of Wood’s depicted subject. Isolated against the cool grey background of indeterminable space, the soft edges of the monstera leaves and the stiff edges of the terracotta pot become more pronounced. Consuming all but the canvas on which it is painted, Untitled (Take 2) implies parity between painting and vessel. Confounding expectations of scale and perspective, Wood reimagines the world as a variegated collage of overlapping, flatly rendered patterns.

Deeply entrenched in art historical tradition, Wood’s painterly process draws upon the legacies renowned modernists such as Henri Matisse, who notably employed collage. One of Wood’s chief inspirations, Matisse similarly rendered leafy amorphic shapes with a stylised flatness and bold colouration in works such as La Gerbe, from 1953. 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 a 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).

Translating the three-dimensional world around him into flat colour and line, Wood’s graphic works combine art historical reference with objects, interiors, and people from his own life. Extending an art historical tradition of scenes from everyday life, Wood’s painterly practice forms an important moment in contemporary art today. The present work witnesses Wood draw heavily upon the techniques of his art historical forebears, creating a style of his own that is resolutely modern and monumental in scale. A balanced interplay of representational space and abstract form, Untitled (Take 2) emerges from the zenith of Wood’s oeuvre to add a resolutely modern twist to the storied genre of still-life painting.