Jonas Wood: Scenes From the Everyday

The LA-based painter reveals early and current influences evidenced in his museum survey at the Dallas Museum of Art.

INTERVIEW BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Jonas Wood.

Portrait by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist.

Los Angeles–based painter Jonas Wood (b. 1977), named the 2017 Artist Honoree by TWO x TWO for AIDS & Art, unveiled his first major solo museum exhibition last month at the Dallas Museum of Art, gathering 33 works across 13 years. With multiple comparisons to David Hockney, Wood’s examinations of the commonplace reveal intimate observations of universal themes through worlds conjured from sources including drawings, preparatory collages, and found imagery. His paintings reference modernist and Pop movements while remaining rooted in the contemporary, resulting in pictorial flatness derived from objects, people, and places.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue, Jonas Wood, published by the DMA and distributed by Yale University Press, which offers a scholarly consideration of Wood’s practice in an art historical context. Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is the Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries and the Senior Artistic Advisor of The Shed, New York, as well as a prolific writer and curator, contributed an interview with the artist for the publication. In an excerpt from that interview, Obrist discusses Wood’s manifold influences, including his grandfather, who was an amateur painter and art collector; the ceramic works of his wife, artist Shio Kusaka; baseball and basketball trading cards; source material from old books; and art collecting.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (HUO): Jonas, your new solo exhibition of paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art includes portraits, still lifes, interiors, and exteriors. You describe the interiors as a stage, and the stage, of course, includes not only people, but images of your art, of others’ art. There is art from ceramics in it. There is part of your collecting activity. It’s all of that.

Jonas Wood, Big Naked Snakes, 2012, oil and acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68 in.

Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Jonas Wood, Greek Pot with Pattern, 2011, oil and acrylic on canvas, 23 x 20 in.

Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago.

Jonas Wood, Self Portrait with Blue Sunglasses, 2012, oil and acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 in.

Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Jonas Wood, Manute, 2014, oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 48 in.

Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Jonas Wood (JW): My interest in ceramics comes from my wife, Shio Kusaka, who is a ceramicist. When I started making still lifes, I was using her work as part of it, looking at pots with her, and just getting into the idea of things painted on a pot. It’s an object that tells a story. It’s very similar to a painting, but it’s this threedimensional vessel.

HUO: You said that it’s like the baseball cards, the basketball cards…They have a shape and form: fluid, graphic, simple. There are cartoons on the side of the pots. They’re stories, right? So, you started to make all these pots paintings, and you were inspired by the Met, also.

JW: That’s where it all started. It also connects to my wife because when we started going to museums together, I would always look at just the paintings. But since she was interested in vessels, I started looking at vessels, too. I think that I super-responded to the black and orange vessels at the Met. They just became another thing I liked to paint. In my own paintings there are genres that I like to paint, and I’m responding to them because they turn me on and make me want to make art about them, to paint them. I realized with the things that I find the most titillating, it’s okay to keep going back to them. You can continue learning even if it seems like the same thing.

HUO: What’s the relationship between figuration and abstraction? You once said in an interview that your paintings of tennis courts are about your interest in abstraction. The court becomes a geometric puzzle. Yet at the same time, you’re a figurative artist, out of pots instead of plants. It seems to oscillate between moments of figuration and abstraction?

Jonas Wood, Moiten Ball, 2015, oil and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 in.

Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist.

JW: I don’t always think about it as “I’m a figurative painter,” or “I’m an abstract painter.” I prefer to look at it as a puzzle and how it’s balanced, which I think is similar to how an abstract painter would think about how a painting would work. Like, is it working, or is it not working? It’s based on composition, and it’s based on color. I think I’m comfortable with painting object paintings. What I consider an object painting is what other people might think is abstract. A tennis court would be like an object; it’s a tennis court. To me, it’s definitely a figurative thing. But the way I’m painting it is super simplified, sort of like a work by Peter Halley with lines and blocks of color that represent something.

Jonas Wood, Australian Open Two, 2012, oil and acrylic on linen, 88 x 60 in.

Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Jonas Wood, The Bat/Bar Mitzvah Weekend, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 88 x 69 in.

Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

HUO: You said that you definitely have bodies of work where you want the experience of viewing to approach abstract painting. So, the tennis court paintings and the basketball paintings are done in colors and lines and emblem. It’s very meditative and compositionally minimal, right?

JW: It’s abstract, I guess. It’s a floating basketball. It’s just simplified. You know what it is? It’s the antithesis to a supercomplicated interior painting that takes a long time to figure out and a long time to paint. And then I get to make this other work which is very simple and straightforward and doesn’t have as many strings attached to it.

HUO: Well, you say that you think of yourself as a figurative painter with an abstract sensibility.

JW: Yes, because it’s whatever the painting needs. Because it’s a painting. I’m not trying to trick you.

HUO: I just visited with Frank Gehry. Architects regularly publish their unrealized projects. But artists don’t. You almost know nothing about their dreams, their utopias, their projects which have been too big to be realized, too time-consuming. Tell me about some of your unrealized projects.

JW: I would like to design and build a house. I thought that maybe I would do it with my father because he’s an architect, but I don’t think he’s really interested in collaborating on it. At one point, when we still lived in my childhood home and I thought he might stay there for the rest of his life, I asked him if he wanted to design a building with me. And I think what I realized he was probably saying to me was, “You can do it yourself. You don’t need me to do it. You could have any architect help you.” And I think he was also saying, “You have your own vision. You can do it.” So, I would like to design the house and build the house that I would live in. I would like to do it with my wife, too. We designed our studio together. But as a project, I would love to do that. I would love to make all the tiles and make terrazzo floors.

HUO: Like a Gesamtkunstwerk. Like a total work of art.

JW: I also want to start a podcast. I think that the art world needs a cool podcast. And I want it to be inclusive. I’m interested in making textiles as well. I think that that would be amazing, you know, to make some really intense textiles. I’ve kind of always had a dream that I [could] start a textile company, completely separate.

HUO: Already three great projects.

JW: I’ve been publishing books and prints for myself.

HUO: Which books have you published?

JW: Shio and I made and published a series of mini-books. They’re based on these little paperback books made in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. I make prints, too, but I’d like to come to an artist and say, “I would like to make a catalogue of your work with you.” Which I’ve sort of done before on a small level. And I would also like to do the same thing with printmaking.

HUO: You collect also. Can you tell me about your collecting?

JW: I was always into collecting from my grandfather. When I started to make a little bit of money, I got into buying the good work from a show because I always thought that trading was hard; you don’t always get the best.

HUO: It’s electrifying, something to do with energy. Can you talk about that?

JW: I want to live with stuff that makes me feel excited. I recently commissioned this giant basketball palanquin from a 72-year-old Ghanaian artist named Paa Joe. I just like to live with art. That’s what I hope people will appreciate in my work, you know?

HUO: I want to understand more what makes you paint a particular image, because there is this interview where you talk about Manute Bol. Why would you, of all basketball players on your basketball cards – you must have thousands— always paint again Manute Bol? What makes you desire to paint a specific basketball player, a specific pot, a specific interior, a specific Schindler house?

JW: I think it’s about intense looking. I’m going to go on a deep dive and try to find something that I’ve come up with in my mind. I’m either going to look in the world for it, or I’m going to look through the stuff that I’ve already collected. I know with Manute Bol, my interest was just from childhood. He was a kind of circus clown-y type guy. He was just giant and skinny and insane-looking, with super-long fingers and super-giant feet and knobby knees. And when I started to make paintings it’s probably like I’m just reliving all of this part; all of my painting feels like it’s part of reliving childhood. I shouldn’t say all of it. But a lot of it. Even with painting people in my family, or painting places that are important to me, or places that are completely made up, I feel like I’m still painting from that kind of energy.

HUO: And what about the Internet? Your Clippings, and little cards, passport cards, all come from the analog work. Your collages are analog. You don’t really do the digital. Sometimes there are distortions involved, where the digital might enter in the translation, but very rarely. Did the Internet change the way you work?

JW: I got to use the experience in the same way that [American painter] Jamian Juliano-Villani makes work. She pillages the Internet for stuff and just takes whatever she wants. And I got to do that when it was first happening. But I experience it differently now. I’ll go to that place if I need it, but I have all these other resources. I like finding the old books and cutting out the pictures.

HUO: Which leads us to you making your books.

JW: Yes, like appropriating books. I grew up with the mini-books I mentioned earlier. They were my grandfather’s and I inherited them. And then I appropriated them with friends of mine who are artists, a work that I liked. I think Shio and I made nine mini-books.

HUO: They’re amazing.

JW: I asked the artists that I was interested in; some I was friends with, but some I asked just because I liked their work. We haven’t made any for a couple years, but we’re going to start making some more soon.

Jonas Wood, Snowscape with Barn, 2017, oil and acrylic on canvas, 106 x 120 in.

Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Photograph by Brian Forrest.

Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.