JONAS WOOD (B. 1977)

Jonas Wood’s monumental Landscape Pot 1 is an extraordinary painting within a painting, an example of the artist’s unparalleled, signature ability to deftly merge the two traditional genres of still life and landscape within his own renowned contemporary style. Standing nearly ten feet tall it is larger than life, and yet it is also an intimate canvas that offers up a personal reflection on the modern human condition. A meticulously rendered sculptural houseplant emerges from a pot emblazoned with a quotidian scene: a hill populated by cell phone or electrical towers, the kinds one might see during a hike in Los Angeles, or indeed, in Tokyo. It is an unexpected subject, one that emits an alluring beauty as we wonder where this place could be, and why it is important. Blueish-gray clouds preside over the scene while taking shape across the circumference of the vessel. As Wood often isolates his pots and their landscapes against a uniform background, we can linger on and appreciate the details that he includes. Delicate features emerge, like the bands of green and brown on the plant’s stem that, like the rings of a tree, mark the passage of time. Notably in this particular composition, the pot sits off center, expanding our perception of the space and allowing for the possibility of growth. In a similar vein, the direction of the plant mirrors the slope of the landscape, both inviting us in.

Wood is known for including everyday objects from his studio in his paintings and making them monumental objects of desire. Landscape Pot 1 is the outcome of a longstanding dialogue between the artist, and his wife, the ceramic artist Shio Kusaka. Wood says, “When I met [her], I started looking at vessels. I became interested in the Greek pots. Like basketball cards, they have a shape and a form, and they have images that are very flat, graphic, and simple. Basically, there are cartoons on the sides of the pots that tell stories” (J. Wood, quoted in J. Samet, “Beer with a Painter, LA Edition: Jonas Wood,” Hyperallergic, September 12, 2015). In Wood’s and Kusaka’s respective practices, their individual forms, subjects, and motifs make their way back and forth organically. They have been compared to some of art history’s most famous artist couples, like “Surrealists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, modern masters Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe and abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner” (K. Crow, “Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka: Each Other’s Artistic Muses,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2015).

In addition to Kusaka, Wood cites David Hockney, Alex Katz, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse as inspirations. Matisse even makes his way as a direct appropriation in Wood’s work in paintings like Matisse Pot 7 (2016). In a review of Jonas Wood & Shio Kusaka: Blackwelder exhibition where Landscape Pot 1 was first exhibited, Artforum observed, “More than the sum of their parts, Wood’s paintings of sunny interiors with plants in turn echo his wife’s ceramics while serving as an homage to Matisse’s Moorish interiors or David Hockney’s leafy palettes” (C. Sanchez-Kozyreva, “Critics’ Picks: Shio Kusaka and Jonas Wood,” Artforum, 2015). Like the great modernists, Wood’s oeuvre is self-referential as he constantly reuses imagery to new ends. He says, “I wanted to paint the landscape pots so they were intentionally unrealistic. They were all filtered into an even looser organization of information that would represent this landscape pot as opposed to trying to paint the perfect landscape on a pot. Because I was recycling the imagery from previous works, it was like painting a painting in a painting” (J. Wood, quoted in B. Sharp, Jonas Wood: Paintings and Drawings, exh. cat., David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2015, p. 8).

One of the artist’s most striking paintings from his ongoing examination of potted plants, Landscape Pot 1 epitomizes Wood’s unmistakable style while continuing to push his work in novel directions. It towers above us, and yet is not removed from us, since we might imagine what daily memories we too would memorialize in paint. As critic Helen Molesworth writes, “A ‘classic’ Jonas Wood painting invariably contains pots… Sometimes it’s lots of pots, casually arranged on shelves, some empty and others housing a variety of succulents; or there are individual pots where the scale of the vessel is enlarged to such a degree that their surfaces can display the enormity of a landscape or the reproduction of another artwork. Wood’s fondness – we might even say his tender love – for pots is part and parcel of his work’s magic” (H. Molesworth, quoted in Phaidon Editors, “Picturing Jonas Wood—Ceramics,” Phaidon, December 11, 2019). We can feel that love in Landscape Pot 1 with Wood’s tender application of paint, as well as his evocation of a memory all his own.