Jonas Wood Computer Drawings, 2008. This work is unique and signed with the artist's initials, titled, numbered respectively and dated "COMPUTER PAPER [1-10] JBRW 2008" on the reverse of each sheet.
Jonas Wood's enigmatic "pot" motif has quickly established itself as one of the artist's defining subjects. His Computer Drawings from 2008 serves as a wonderful glimpse into, and embodiment of, Wood's particularly alluring and endearing art brut style of figuration. These drawings, immediate in their lack of excessive adornment, modeling or even coloration, directly confront the viewer with the simultaneous solidity of their representation and fragility of their actual existence—as ceramic objects used to house plants.
Wood further confounds the viewer with the title for this work, seemingly alluding to the basic, early computer illustration software that rendered objects in a crude, flat manner. To achieve the distortion of space that is so essential to his oeuvre, Wood photographs his subjects from multiple angles, collaging these images together and employing drawing to "work out the kinks and...locate what [feels] right." (Jonas Wood, quoted in Amanda Law, "Q & A with Artist Jonas Wood," Hammer Museum, February 16, 2010, online).
[The aesthetic is] led by Wood's ability to distort and juxtapose even the most ordinary of figures and spaces.
Computer Drawings strips away the artifice of the computer and the camera, and what the viewer is left with is a seemingly unadulterated understanding of the artist's intimate surrounds. The pots themselves, as manifestations of his wife, Shio Kusaka—herself an accomplished artist who sculpts them—are imbued with a sensitivity and raw emotion that is heightened by the inclusion of the delicate plants within. One can detect a propensity for beautifying the everyday, the allure of still life, dreaminess, whimsicality and also an undeniable graphic flare.
And yet, while all such distinct threads of inspiration can be identified, it is evident in the execution and abstraction of the pots and plants, and the eradication of a background and foreground that Computer Drawings retains the artist's own unique aesthetic: led by Wood's ability to distort and juxtapose even the most ordinary of figures and spaces.