Thursday, January 1, 2015

Jonas Wood at David Kordansky

Jonas Wood at David Kordansky
(Jonas Wood at David Kordansky)

With the dilute abstraction of today’s forever now atemporal soup, the reptilian pleasure of seeing objects painted feels like relief. To see something rather than sift histories. Like 8bit nostalgia, or Guston’s plodding brushwork, the faux-niavete of Wood’s style magnifies choices made in representation, the shortcuts and decisions. The chunking holds the object depicted behind the filter of its maker, Wood’s subjectivity of calculating how to represent, the decisions sedimented as strokes itself a subject. The way a boxer's tattoos get rendered, or the way the likely commissioned portraits become suddenly less wonky. It’s an act of framing, holding “painting” at slight remove, like the pots as paintings, framing the container.  It’s stupid fun.