Reviewed the Jonas Wood show for Newcity. Some other thoughts follow.
I had a tough time writing this review; my first draft seemed just... snarky, though I was challenged by, and enjoyed, the show. I suppose it had to do with the fact that I unhip-ly view these paintings as wholly pre-Cubist, ala Matisse or Cezanne. At least making allowances that other stuff has happened in the art world since then I would contemporize it via David Hockney. I think Wood probably gets a lot from Hockney: L.A., the reliance on photography, flat space, theoretically whimsical subject matter. All that camera obscura junk. I also get a taste of De Chirico, as probably does Hockney, in terms of ominous, barren space.
The first time I went by the gallery the baseball cards were my favorite pieces. I liked the crudity, I liked the materials—I am always partial to works on paper. They seemed childish, naïve, and folksy. But upon a second viewing, though they maintained this initial impression better than the paintings, they too retained this bizarre sadness. Feelings of death. It was like Larry Bird was made out of wax and crushed into the amorphous crowd behind him. Of course it wasn’t really Larry Bird, and of course the presumed subject was a card—a 2-d object—but the image of the man was that of a freak swallowed by the sideshow. Which I guess in a sense is what happens to athletes. The James Worthy drawing held a less bitter feeling: it reminded me of an old video game, big pixels unable to form a coherent likeness—I would think Wood I about my age and this nostalgia makes sense.
The three plant still-life works don’t do a ton for me, but they express the larger ideas discussed in my review fairly well. I also think they can provide some real keys to an element of his technique that is kind of like a visual William Burroughs with a large dose of manipulating layers in photoshop.
Another thing I wasn't able to get into too much is the concept of the "fetish." It seemed to me that every source object was just that, some sort of religious object from a dead time... It’s an interesting show, worth checking out, but be sure to give yourself some time to make a second impression.
