Jake Wood-Evans

Wood-Evans’ work maintains a close and complex relationship with European art history. Recent collections have been influenced by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Henry Raeburn and other prominent figures of the Golden Age of British painting. Alongside this, his eye has turned to the Baroque paintings of Flemish artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck, or work by the Dutch Masters of the 17th Century. Wood-Evans has an ongoing fascination with the work of Velazquez, something rooted in his practice since his time spent studying at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Wood-Evans’ oeuvre blurs the boundaries between past and present by encapsulating the essence of the works he studies, through a process of excavation and exploration rather than replication. The figures are imbued with an archaic sense of pomp and bravado, but are never so obviously rendered that this becomes the focal point of the piece. This may account for the melancholy aura Wood-Evans’ work so often possesses: the paintings fizz and crackle with the energy of the past, but the usual, visceral signs of such energy remain just out of reach. The works are simultaneously distinct and indistinct, eluding exact interpretation and opening up possibilities for multiple readings. As such, Wood-Evans encourages us to look again, beyond the surface of the traditional image and see anew. At the foundation of Wood-Evans’ work is the appreciation of the fact that paintings by Old Masters exist in the present day, in our world, and when we view these pieces we can’t help but project our contemporary aesthetic sensibilities on to them; Wood-Evan’s work is the distillation of this process of aesthetic, cultural and temporal transference. 

Describing his work as, “a process of conflict with the ambiguous space between representation and abstraction”, Wood-Evans resists the urge to provide easy readings or instantly accessible compositions. He invites the viewer to pause and quietly contemplate a series of multi-layered paintings that denote a common visual language, one built through our shared history and consumption of art imagery.