Jonas Wood

October 31, 2008, New York—For his second solo exhibition in New York, Los Angeles-based painter Jonas Wood has put together a group of family portraits, interiors, and still lifes. Wood uses these genres as templates for infusing his work with personal sentiment and meaning. The paintings and watercolor drawings reverberate between their seemingly traditional format, the personally charged choice of subject matter, and their complex formal interlocking and mosaic-like appearance.

The paintingsʼ tilted perspective, their blocky flatness, and the compositional autonomy of the sharp-edged color planes point at Woodʼs deep-rooted interest in concepts of time and the legibility of nature. The work expresses spatial, colorist, and psychological sharpness as well as emotional intensity, and combines it with a thrill of present-day spectacle that goes beyond any classical restraint. Wood puts our visual world out of its order. He plays with it, dissects it, and reassembles it into a condensed essence of visuality. Woodʼs paintings are like love letters of a true fan wrapped in an abstract landscape of jewel-like luminous cells.

Anton Kern Gallery and Picturebox have published a 48-page hard-cover publication entitled “SPORTS BOOK.” It takes as its subject a small slice of Woodʼs oeuvre, sports portraits: lanky basketball players, poised baseball players; moments of serene waiting and explosive action. This body of work combines Woodʼs obvious love of the game with an expert eye for emotion and the thrill of competition. Sport becomes a metaphor of how disparate parts combined create a whole. “SPORTS BOOK” features an essay by Cecilia Alemani and a conversation between the artist and three-time NBA All-Star Rip Hamilton.