The exhibition provides viewers with many opportunities to follow Wood as he examines an idea from numerous perspectives, rendering it in different mediums and altering its feel and scope as he responds to their possibilities and demands. They also demonstrate the artist’s breadth and curiosity: he employs various types of printmaking to create a range of effects and moods, and experiments with varying approaches to layering and foreground/background distinctions. The works on paper that constitute an essential part of Plants and Animals shed further light on the elaboration of these various modes of thought, intuition, and production. He pays special attention to the viscosity and structure of the oil medium, which allows the eye to perceive these marks as carriers of color as well as instances of material invention in their own right.Įach of these characteristics reveals Wood’s project to be one in which craft and process go hand-in-hand with psychological connection and overall pictorial vision. Wood gives every mark, no matter how small, an indelible feeling, character, and shape. Density, therefore, becomes paradoxically responsible for imbuing the compositions with vibrating luminosity, even as it roots their presence in the material world. Whether he is rendering images of densely patterned textiles, thick dog fur, or large-scale, foliage-packed landscapes, Wood produces each painted mark with remarkable clarity and intention. The teeming detail that defines many works in Plants and Animals has visual as well as physical functions. Woven throughout some pictures, for instance, are carefully modulated grey and neutral tones that generate palpable volume. While many of the paintings are notable for their saturated hues and bold forms, they all contain innumerable instances in which less immediately perceptible decisions play key roles in the paintings’ overall effect. What unifies these diverse elements are Wood’s increasingly nuanced approaches to color and paint application. In some paintings, he establishes anachronous juxtapositions, inserting family members into images he finds on the internet or compiling entirely fictional scenes out of otherwise factual elements drawn from diverse sources. Imagery from one work often appears in others, highlighting the ways in which Wood’s ideas go through these several phases of development. To make paintings, he works from photographs, drawings, and collages in technical terms, his sources often combine several of these approaches as well as varying degrees of mediation, with Wood developing his ideas according to principles that are as informed by abstract notions of pattern and shape as they are by representational fidelity. Wood has long turned to subjects that attract him for their personal relevance and formal idiosyncrasy. The works in Plants and Animals were made over the last three years, and often are the results of evolving studies that go back even further than that. The subtleties of scale, color, and visual texture that are found everywhere throughout this show, however, demonstrate both the evolving nature of Wood’s ideas and his ever-increasing commitment to his vision, including his passion for and preternatural understanding of the material elements of painting, drawing, and printmaking themselves. Wood foregrounds the processes of composition that are the driving forces in all of his pictures. In Plants and Animals, Jonas Wood explores some of the most frequently recurring themes in his work, turning to a variety of formats and mediums to render images not only of flora and fauna, but also of detailed worlds of related forms, spaces, and moods. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, January 22 from 4 to 8 PM. Occupying all three of the gallery's exhibition spaces, the exhibition will be on view January 22 through March 5, 2022. David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Plants and Animals, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Jonas Wood.
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