Drenched in saturated scarlet, Red Pot with White Blouse is Jonas Wood’s homage to artist Henri Matisse, whose flattening of space and graphic application has remained one of Wood’s chief artistic influences. The work is a Matisse painting within another Matisse painting, superimposed on a pot, and graphed back into Wood’s idiosyncratic style. Wood’s pot paintings are highly regarded and sought-after and reside within the collections of esteemed institutions including The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others. Red Pot with White Blouse epitomizes Jonas Wood’s masterful fusion of artistic influence and personal significance, transforming the humble pot into a riff on the traditional idea of painting-as-window.

In Red Pot with White Blouse, Wood takes a three-dimensional pot – a key recurring symbol which reflects the influence of his wife Shio Kusaka’s celebrated ceramic practice – and flattens it to accommodate the two-dimensional oil painting medium, accentuating his collage-like style and propensity for spatial distortion. On the surface of the pot, Wood places Matisse’s La Blouse Roumaine, a charming portrait of a woman rendered with graphic detail and vibrant color, as a tableau within Matisse’s Large Red Interior. This act, along with the striking color, simplified forms, and lack of visual depth equally evokes The Red Studio, Matisse’s depiction of his workroom outside of Paris filled with paintings and sculptures, even a plate, all of his own making. Emphasizing both the malleability of image and a lack of fixation on it, the pastiche of images in Red Pot with White Blouse functions like a kind of slippage: Matisse’s meta-inclusion of his own paintings are turned into yet another work by the same artist.

In the domestic setting of Red Pot with White Blouse, figuration weaves amongst pulsating color and abstracted patterns. The objects swim in brilliant scarlet, whose saturated color is forceful enough to resist the illusion of depth and push to the surface of the painting. The details of studio objects – floral arrangements, potted plants, and fragments of furniture – are depicted in blues, pinks, greens, yellows, and oranges that add to the painting’s striking vivacity. As with Wood’s iconic clipping paintings, in which the artist literally clips or borrows details from his previous works to create new compositions, the present work’s painterly collage is highly evocative of Matisse’s cutouts and highlights the fundamental impact of Matisse’s stylistic innovations throughout Wood’s practice. In the last decade of Matisse’s life, the artist began cutting up gouache-painted paper into a wide range of shapes and re-arranging them into new compositions. Wood’s approach is similar: working initially from a personal archive of photographs and found imagery, he goes through a process of layering and collaging, using photography, projection, drawing, and then painting to create his graphic masterpieces.

The interplay of representational space and abstracted form in Red Pot with White Blouse is exemplified by the pot’s geometric composition; flattened against the picture plane, the work acts as a self-contained rendering akin to a television screen or photograph. The rounded edges of the pot in Red Pot with White Blouse reach towards either side of the canvas and are met by the gray border that grounds the pot in an unknown setting. “Object painting, still-life, landscape, portraiture, interior, exterior – those are the things I do in terms of subject matter. These totemic pots are the most non-representational representational – they don’t exist in a space. They are defined by the object” (Jonas Wood quoted in: Maria Vogel, “At Gagosian, Jonas Wood Continues his Ongoing Exploration into Painting”, Art of Choice, 25 April 2019 (online))

A brilliant painting within Jonas Wood’s celebrated oeuvre, Red Pot with White Blouse’s constructed interior covers the surface of a graphic pot, toying with the perception of space, volume, flatness, and depth, and appropriating Matisse's work into a form that is unique and remarkably contemporary. Even as Wood retains the figural details of Matisse’s paintings, they are further stylized; Wood transforms the fluent brushstrokes of Matisse into thin rectilinear lines, swaths of tactile paint reinterpreted as distinct, sharply contoured, and flattened forms. The resulting image is strikingly reminiscent of the technologized imagery of our digital era, preserving the pleasure of the mediums of oil and acrylic along with the aesthetics of the twentieth century.

Artist

Jonas Wood