Domestic bliss with Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood does not discriminate. For the Los Angeles-based artist, a made-up scene of a boho interior deserves its place in his rich and textured paintings as much as those thriving, omnipresent houseplants which he labours to keep alive. An abandoned orange library-book strolling unit, apparently discarded and left out on the street, has as much right to be there as a tender depiction of his young family. Indeed, one of the aspects of Wood’s practice that I most admire is how he does not seem to worry about the old categorical hierarchies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Social media, the proliferation of content, and spending a substantial part of our waking life on screens has changed the way we look at the world. Wood acknowledges not only what we look at, and puts it all in his canvases, but scrutinises how we look. He reminds us how much we miss even when we spend so much of our lives looking. I meet him at Gagosian’s marquee gallery in Grosvenor Hill, which opened an eponymous exhibition of his work during Frieze week, and ask: Does he discriminate between his subject matter? Does anything matter more than anything else?

“I’m an image collector, I’m looking for things to paint and looking for ways to accumulate that information through”, he tells me: “These might be old photos from my family that I’ve collected, from my family archive, pictures that I’ve taken myself, pictures that people have sent me, and pictures that I’m looking for… if I find something that’s cool on the internet, an inspiration on Instagram or in Google search, that also works.” His paintings serve as a kind of inventory of a whole plethora of different places, experiences and perceptions, which are collaged together in entirely imagined mise en scène for the stage-play of his life. I say ‘stage-play’ because there is a distinctly performed element to these compositions. They are created; they don’t exist, they will never exist, they are made up of composite fragments, and yet somehow we suspend our disbelief. Some rooms are appropriated from interior design magazines, others from photographs of his house, others from the internet. It is impossible to know where these places are unless he is willing to tell you.

In Shio Shrine (2024), Wood responds to a photograph that he took from a “random shop in Chinatown”, with various vessels on shelving units. He switched out what was in the photograph and reassigned those vessels to resemble different versions of those made by his wife, the celebrated artist and ceramicist Shio Kusaka. They looked better there, presumably. In another work, we see two shih tzus, Robot and Bear, laid out on a migraine-inducing black-and-white patterned sofa. Once we learn that one dog is deceased and has been reimagined next to his successor as the beloved family pet, the image is transformed. No longer representing idle days in domestic bliss, the picture becomes elegiac and recuperative, but it also demands that we know something of Wood’s life to gather this meaning. Is this a problem for him, as an artist?

“I’m an image-maker, a picture-maker”, he tells me, “but I kind of want you to think, as the viewer, that they could all be real, or they all really happened to me, and that these places exist.” Wood’s father was an architect and his mother a theatre designer. His father travelled to London to see the new show, and father and son were photographed together in front of Wood’s Chelsea (2024), which depicts the functional cladding and exteriors of housing blocks in New York’s otherwise glamourous gallery zone. I ask whether their shared sense of world-building had an influence on him. “The older I get, the more indebted to them I become”, Wood reflects, “I’m really just building things… I just took a picture of me and my dad in front of this building and I realised, for the first time, ‘Oh, like we’re both builders in a kind of way.”’

Wood remembers how his father used to buy him puzzles to help his severely dyslexic son express himself. Spending time in the exhibition, this makes perfect sense. Wood’s paintings have the obstinate flatness and two-dimensional quality of a jigsaw, pieced together square by square, as well as the infinite possibilities for world-building that a child experiences when they pick up a Lego set for the first time. This is not to say that these canvases are a game “to be worked out” or completed; they are far too enigmatic for that. But they have the child’s restlessness, no doubt: “imagination can take you anywhere”, he tells me, as though it’s a secret.

When I ask what is next for him, Wood shies away. “Some personal time”, he says, “to travel a little more, and spend more time with my wife and teenage kids.” With his domestic life, his family, his personal affects so present in his work, I wonder how he manages to differentiate. “I’m working on setting up a print shop and having my whole print archive there”, Wood continues. This a major endeavour, I have no doubt, and after his collaborations with the fascinating Santa Monica printer Jacob Samuel––a master of cross-hatching and aquatint––he has an ever-expanding inventory to conserve and maintain. But it’s Wood’s tentative plan to stage a new exhibition of “freaky portraits” that excites me, delivered with a half-smirk behind his huge-rimmed glasses. Wood has made portraits before, of course: Picasso in a fez, a young Hockney smoking, Boston Red Sox heroes, reimagined family portraits. “There are some early compositions in my studio I’m looking forward to getting back to”, he tells me: “one, for instance, has my two kids in the picture, and three versions of myself in them, tracking my life as a father and the passage of time, as well as more basketball players, and dogs, lots of dogs. Oh, and some aliens.” I smile. He smiles. Wood doesn’t seem like he’s making any distinctions about his subject matter anytime soon. Everything has its place in his wonderful world: everything belongs somewhere.