Issy Wood, Self-portrait 32, 2023, oil on linen, 175 x 215 cm
2025. Issy Wood
In the summer of 1954, Roland Barthes wrote ironically about the impossibility of a writer taking vacations: “What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer is that, during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he, unlike them, does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing. Thus, he is a false worker and a false holiday-maker as well.” Imagine having a job based on being “the specialists of the human heart,” as Barthes also writes, and coming across the ocean: it becomes impossible to rest. The pictorial, semantic, and poetic curiosity that does not obey academic hierarchies—which can arise from the glory of an imposing set of ornate porcelain tableware, a crooked smile with flashy braces, Sex and the City screencaps, or paintings by Bosch and Goya in the Museo del Prado in Madrid—characterizes Issy Wood’s practice.
The intertwining of writing and painting reflects Wood’s progressive interest in the signification of everything. Both her textual and pictorial practices emphasize the overvaluation of the ubiquitous, the refined, and the detailed—perhaps even obsessive—observation of everyday life, wherein the ordinary occupies a realm of strangeness (similar to the experience of repeating our own name several times and realizing how odd the connection with its written form is). The fascination with the ciphered and the tenacity that internalizes a delirious world of images, whose mysticism only overwhelms, is encapsulated by Wood in her perception of the devastating actions of seemingly harmless objects—such as chairs displayed in museums that one cannot sit on—or conversely, like the rapturous blood elevators in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, where the scenographic hemorrhagic deluge drowns no one. Wood’s paintings exhibit an implacable frontality, presenting a straightforward image that, paradoxically, couldn’t be less direct, generating a rhizomatic array of signifying suggestions and narrative magnetisms.
An approximation to hedonism can be traced through the pleasure of cooking beautiful meals, the trendy use of skincare products, and the luxurious self-indulgence in particular leather-finished objects, while simultaneously establishing restrictions—tidal-like restraints that ebb and flow. This situation can arise from rules set by a twisted and contradictory authority created or found by the artist, which may sometimes align with the canon in art history or stem from careful observation of contemporary culture. The taste for certain tacky images, often deemed tasteless, actually results from a hyper-complex aesthetic system. These ostentatious ornamental symbols engage in a certain way with the echoes of the Baroque in Wood’s work: emphasizing allegorical, audacious, and self-referential aspects, these unhinged images, arriving with the force of an incessant flow that scorches the retina, materialize in new decorations that orbit the paintings and in multi-paneled velvet artworks.
The bold images exhibited by Wood consistently inhabit the wavering threshold between arid scarcity and overwhelming abundance, between logorrhea and laconism, usually crowned with a title. Her practice appears to investigate the ethical boundaries of the image, as well as the obsessive—and somewhat tautological—phenomenon surrounding it. There is a continual overflow of virtual or ideal agents into the physical human experience and, extending the inquiry further, into sociopolitical realms. This happens when the acceptability of some events is evaluated, such as the eerie implications of questioning feminine archetypes—like in A still-fuckable Jane Fonda pumps iron, 2020, or Women laughing with birth control, 2019. This can occur in an almost fictional yet extremely real and hurtful environment, as seen in Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas, more precisely in Jane’s staged bedroom at the peepshow club where the character works. There, the performativity of a staged persona becomes confused with her own personality, the act of facing a one-way mirror in which she is seen but cannot see, along with the telephone connection to someone who is supposedly distant yet merely a meter away, separated by a thin, false membrane.
Returning to the sociopolitical consequences of the image: how can we contain an avalanche of images that forces us to bow before them? Is there a power of choice in experiencing a staggering tension, like a sharp tightness in the chest that fully immobilizes us, both body and mind? Do I, as an artistic subject, exist as bourgeois entertainment, or am I an impostor for attempting to treat artistic practice as a professional activity, regardless of whether it is governed by fundamental contemporary labor norms in the proletarian world? Why can we not rest—and when we do, or feel close to it, guilt often prevails as the shadow of laziness? In his aforementioned anecdotal essay, Barthes responds: “Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop."
Text originally published in CURA, Issue 44, Spring-Summer 2025
The intertwining of writing and painting reflects Wood’s progressive interest in the signification of everything. Both her textual and pictorial practices emphasize the overvaluation of the ubiquitous, the refined, and the detailed—perhaps even obsessive—observation of everyday life, wherein the ordinary occupies a realm of strangeness (similar to the experience of repeating our own name several times and realizing how odd the connection with its written form is). The fascination with the ciphered and the tenacity that internalizes a delirious world of images, whose mysticism only overwhelms, is encapsulated by Wood in her perception of the devastating actions of seemingly harmless objects—such as chairs displayed in museums that one cannot sit on—or conversely, like the rapturous blood elevators in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, where the scenographic hemorrhagic deluge drowns no one. Wood’s paintings exhibit an implacable frontality, presenting a straightforward image that, paradoxically, couldn’t be less direct, generating a rhizomatic array of signifying suggestions and narrative magnetisms.
An approximation to hedonism can be traced through the pleasure of cooking beautiful meals, the trendy use of skincare products, and the luxurious self-indulgence in particular leather-finished objects, while simultaneously establishing restrictions—tidal-like restraints that ebb and flow. This situation can arise from rules set by a twisted and contradictory authority created or found by the artist, which may sometimes align with the canon in art history or stem from careful observation of contemporary culture. The taste for certain tacky images, often deemed tasteless, actually results from a hyper-complex aesthetic system. These ostentatious ornamental symbols engage in a certain way with the echoes of the Baroque in Wood’s work: emphasizing allegorical, audacious, and self-referential aspects, these unhinged images, arriving with the force of an incessant flow that scorches the retina, materialize in new decorations that orbit the paintings and in multi-paneled velvet artworks.
The bold images exhibited by Wood consistently inhabit the wavering threshold between arid scarcity and overwhelming abundance, between logorrhea and laconism, usually crowned with a title. Her practice appears to investigate the ethical boundaries of the image, as well as the obsessive—and somewhat tautological—phenomenon surrounding it. There is a continual overflow of virtual or ideal agents into the physical human experience and, extending the inquiry further, into sociopolitical realms. This happens when the acceptability of some events is evaluated, such as the eerie implications of questioning feminine archetypes—like in A still-fuckable Jane Fonda pumps iron, 2020, or Women laughing with birth control, 2019. This can occur in an almost fictional yet extremely real and hurtful environment, as seen in Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas, more precisely in Jane’s staged bedroom at the peepshow club where the character works. There, the performativity of a staged persona becomes confused with her own personality, the act of facing a one-way mirror in which she is seen but cannot see, along with the telephone connection to someone who is supposedly distant yet merely a meter away, separated by a thin, false membrane.
Returning to the sociopolitical consequences of the image: how can we contain an avalanche of images that forces us to bow before them? Is there a power of choice in experiencing a staggering tension, like a sharp tightness in the chest that fully immobilizes us, both body and mind? Do I, as an artistic subject, exist as bourgeois entertainment, or am I an impostor for attempting to treat artistic practice as a professional activity, regardless of whether it is governed by fundamental contemporary labor norms in the proletarian world? Why can we not rest—and when we do, or feel close to it, guilt often prevails as the shadow of laziness? In his aforementioned anecdotal essay, Barthes responds: “Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop."
Text originally published in CURA, Issue 44, Spring-Summer 2025
Issy Wood, Trillema, 2021, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, installation view
Issy Wood, Furni, 2023, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, installation view
Issy Wood, Self portrait 52, 2023, oil on linen, 215 x 175 cm