"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."
O scillating between representational still-life and abstraction, Orchid Clipping Diptych thrives on the nuanced moments where representation disintegrates into a sheer pattern of form and color. Powerfully evocative of Henri Matisse’s boldly colored abstract cut-outs, Orchid Clipping Diptych by Jonas Wood is a sublime testament to the timeless visual intrigue of overlapping textures, splendid use of color, and the elegant prowess of the line. A diptych of almost identical renderings of red and pink orchids, the present work is highly stylized, and unearths Wood’s uncanny ability to infuse a seemingly simple subject with visual intrigue and dynamic presence.
Working in traditional genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture Wood joins a lineage that stretches from modern masters such as Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse to contemporary giants David Hockney and Alex Katz. Over the past decade and a half Wood has carved out his own distinctive and critically lauded aesthetic that is embedded in a rich network of art-historical reference. His style is a playful yet rigorous interrogation of the traditional representational challenge of capturing three-dimensional forms on the flat picture plane; by flattening shapes and exaggerating forms, he achieves gently unsettling yet highly stimulating canvases. The present work’s exaggerated green leaves allude to this playful and experimental handling of forms that ultimately conflates abstraction and figuration.
