Why Jonas Wood Paints Tennis Courts Nobody Is Playing On

The courts are empty. There are no players. The ball is not in the frame. What Jonas Wood has painted in his new series is a tennis tournament as pure geometry: the service lines, the baseline, the net post, the court surface in whatever specific blue or green or clay-red the venue happened to use that week. Two of the paintings are titled Shanghai Masters and WTA Finals Riyadh. Those are real tournaments. The surfaces are accurate. The players are gone. ## What a Vertically Oriented Canvas Does to a Horizontal Court The formal move in this series is worth sitting with. Wood paints tennis courts, which are horizontal objects, on canvases that are oriented vertically. The court does not fill the rectangle. It sits inside it, surrounded by space. Some of that surrounding space is painted solid black. Wood has said this conveys what it feels like to watch televised tennis in a darkened room. You are not at the tournament. You are looking at a screen where the edges dissolve into the dark around your television. The court is there, lit, precise. Everything else is not. This is a precise and quiet description of contemporary spectatorship. Not the crowd. Not the sound. The court, the light, and the dark around it. ## The Collage Works and What They Add A separate group of works in the Beverly Hills exhibition develops the courts differently. Instead of the solid-black flanking zones, Wood collages the surrounding space with imagery drawn from his domestic environment, his studio, other series in his painting practice, and appropriated art historical sources. One of the art historical sources is Roy Lichtenstein. Wood combining his tennis court geometry with Lichtenstein reference puts two extremely flat American painters in conversation. Lichtenstein flattened Abstract Expressionism's gesture into halftone dots and primary colors. Wood is flattening the atmosphere of a live sporting event into the graphic language of television reception and bedroom walls. Both are about what reproduction does to experience. The collage approach also puts the tennis court in relationship to the rest of Wood's practice, which has long included domestic interiors, plant paintings, and basketball imagery. A tennis court next to a cactus painting next to a snippet of a de Kooning is Wood saying: these things share a visual neighborhood in my attention whether or not they share a subject. ## Why This Is the Right Show for Los Angeles This is Gagosian's tenth Jonas Wood exhibition and its first in Los Angeles. Wood lives in Los Angeles. He has shown extensively in New York, London, and across Europe at Gagosian locations. The decision to bring the tenth show to his home city is a particular kind of institutional acknowledgment. Los Angeles art audiences are also the right audience for tennis court paintings. The city has courts everywhere. The Beverly Hills show opens twelve miles from Holmby Park, ten miles from Griffith Park, three miles from the Crossroads of the World. Tennis in LA is not a foreign country. It is a Thursday morning before work. Painting it as a landscape is, in Los Angeles, a local act. ## What the Market Says About Wood Right Now Jonas Wood at Gagosian through ten exhibitions is a specific institutional signal. Gagosian does not make commitments at that level without a clear thesis about where the work is going. The consistency, first at Gagosian Rome, then New York, then London, now LA, builds provenance in the way that matters for secondary market performance. The tennis court subject is also a new series, not a continuation of the basketball courts or the interiors that established his earlier market position. A new series at this gallery tier means Gagosian believes collectors want to follow Wood into unfamiliar territory. That is a meaningful vote of institutional confidence. The show is up through April 25. If you are in Beverly Hills between now and then, the courts are empty and that, it turns out, is the point.