Jonas Wood:

The Rules of the Game

A tennis match could theoretically go on forever. There is a clock, but the elapsed time has no implication for the match; in theory, two perfectly paired opponents could go in and out of deuce, game after game, forever. As I left Jonas Wood’s studio recently, the thought occurred to me that the same might be true of his series of tennis court paintings, bound as they are by rules and parameters that seem to allow for endless repetition with infinite different results. These rules are clearly important to Wood. So too is the practice, a word so debased by overuse in art discourse that I hesitate to evoke it but for the fact that I do so here in the more literal, more athletic sense: to get the reps in, to get better, to optimize performance in the studio. I will return to this idea of practice later, but first, the rules.

Wood’s tennis court paintings are neither paintings of tennis courts nor paintings of tennis courts on television. They are paintings of images (sometimes straight photographs, sometimes collages) of tennis courts on a television in Wood’s studio and home. In that sense they are more about watching tennis on television, often while painting, than they are about playing or watching tennis in person. The first rule therefore is the frame.

On television, tennis is usually seen through a camera positioned overhead and behind one baseline. In his 2006 New York Times essay “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” David Foster Wallace describes this specific geometric condition in painterly terms: “You, the viewer, are above and looking down from behind the court,” Wallace explains, and “this perspective, as any art student will tell you, ‘foreshortens’ the court.”¹ This forced vantage point, from which the long rectangle of the court appears nearly square in perspective, is Wood’s point of departure. As a result, in many of these tennis court paintings we see a rectangle cut into smaller boxes and alleys by white lines, surrounded by an out-of-bounds, filmed from its shorter end so that it appears squarish, broadcast within the horizontal frame of a television, and more often than not photographed on a vertically oriented iPhone. In other words, each of these paintings begins with a vertical rectangle foreshortened within a horizontal rectangular frame within a vertical rectangular frame. The dimensions of the court and the respective aspect ratios of the screens establish the specific geometry of the series and connect it to the art-historical reference of Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square (c. 1950–76).

Albers had his rules too: Each painting contained three or four concentric squares built with paint applied directly from the tube with a palette knife. The concentric frames of multiple squares functioned for him, as tennis courts and screens do for Wood, as fields on which to experiment with the interactions of color. Tournament-level tennis is particularly conducive to this exercise because of the various surfaces and textures on which it is played. The red-brick clay at the French Open, the neatly trimmed Wimbledon grass, and the blue hard courts of the US and Australian Opens, for example, comprise the Grand Slam quartet that were the subject of Wood’s first tennis court paintings fifteen years ago.

Television broadcasting is largely responsible for the chromatic range that makes contemporary tennis such a fertile ground for experiments in color theory. The International Tennis Federation started using the now ubiquitous yellow ball in 1972, not for the players’ benefit but because this specific shade of yellow, called “optic yellow,” is easier to see on television than the traditional white tennis balls. Following suit, major tournaments saw an opportunity to use colored courts as a means of distinguishing themselves. The (nearly blue) “Pro Purple” surface at the BNP Paribas Open (Indian Wells, 2025), for example, was designed to be the exact spectral opposite of optic yellow. The women’s final in Riyadh (WTA Finals Riyadh, 2025) is played on a brilliant purple court inside charcoal gray. A similar charcoal gray is used for the entire court at the Laver Cup in its various locations, which I particularly like because it reminds me of the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), in which a troupe of mimes play tennis without a ball. Wood has not painted the Laver Cup court, though, I assume because it is only an exhibition tournament, so that’s another rule. The National Bank Open (Canadian Open, 2025) uses a more traditional blue court surrounded by green, while the Abierto Mexicano Telcel is played on a monochrome field of blue (Mexican Open, 2025). The Erste Bank Open and Swiss Indoors Basel (both of which are painted in this show) use their own shade of blue inside the lines and another slightly lighter one out of bounds. The calendar of international tournaments provides a succession of ready-made exercises in color theory.

In his essay “Green or Yellow,” Nicholas Fox Weber, director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, discusses the color theory of the tennis ball in relation to specific examples of Albers’s Homage to the Square that use a similar shade of acid green inside squares of blue and gray.² Indeed, the color looks different each time, just as an optic yellow ball likely appears more yellow rising off the blue court at Arthur Ashe in New York and greener against the clay at Roland Garros in Paris. The green or yellow question is not of great relevance to Wood’s tennis court paintings, which do not include balls. That’s a rule. So too are no players, no players’ benches, no umpires, no ball crews. The crowd, if shown, is reduced to an abstraction, the kind of graphic pattern that might appear in a vintage video game, which, incidentally, is also the subject of a painting in this show (Nintendo 3, 2025). The only three-dimensional object on the court, other than the net, is the umpire’s chair, which occurs regularly but not always and which, I suppose, serves as a symbolic reminder of Wood’s rules.

The absence of figures in these paintings shifts the courts from scenes of action to sites of abstraction. Sometimes a scoreboard tells us who is playing and where they are in the match, but for the most part the atmosphere is one of time suspended—no players, no weather, no shadow. Wood talks about removing the athletes from the court in these paintings as a way of emphasizing the flat expanses of color. The erasure reminds me of two other works that grapple with the narrative space of televised sports, Paul Pfeiffer’s ongoing series Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, though instead of isolating the solitary figure, Wood turns his focus to the geometric puzzle of the empty field of play.

As with much of Wood’s work, the tennis court paintings often include glimpses of the studio in which they were made: Plants and printouts and patterned surfaces fill the space surrounding the screen. In Shanghai Masters (2025), a television monitor shows the first set of a match between Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic. On the wall behind the television is a collection of notes and postcards, including ideas, lists of things to do, and motivational messages like “Relax and have fun” or “Finish strong.” Wood is open about his interest in self-help and notes like these can be found throughout the studio. When I first saw them on the wall, I was reminded of a scene in the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster when the record label brings in a performance coach accustomed to working with professional football players to help James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich work through a period of creative impasse.³ The session does not go well, but the scene forever changed the way I think about creative performance in relationship to sports psychology.

Shanghai Masters also reminds me of Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open (2009), written in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winner J. R. Moehringer. Open rises above the sports-memoir genre in part because of Agassi’s remarkable candor about his struggles with mental health, family dynamics, and self-image.⁴ In a field crowded with triumphantly self-congratulatory memoirs, Open is a book about how hard being really good at something can be.

Tennis is a good metaphor for the creative process and there happens to be some extraordinary writing on the topic by authors in addition to those already mentioned, including Geoff Dyer, John McPhee, Vladimir Nabokov, Claudia Rankine, and Álvaro Enrigue, whose 2013 book Sudden Death imagines a match between the poet Francisco de Quevedo and Caravaggio.⁵ In the penultimate chapter of Speak, Memory (1951), Nabokov, an avid tennis player, famously wrote that “the pleasure of writing is not unlike that of playing tennis.” I have always read some irony in the statement, or at least a wry implication of that specific kind of hard-won pleasure that can only be derived from enormous effort. (Other writers, including Wallace and Dyer, who also compares tennis to writing in his 2016 Harper’s article “Tennis Lessons,” are more candid about how frustrating both can be.)

Tennis, like writing or artmaking, is largely an individual enterprise. You need an opponent to play, but it is a cliché in tennis writing that the player’s true adversary is not on the other side of the net. “The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself,” Wallace writes in Infinite Jest (1996). “Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive.”⁶ All of this is to say that to be good, you must be so disciplined that your play is nearly automatic while you also remain distinctly yourself. It is this tension between discipline and style, for example, that animates the masterful back and forth of McPhee’s book Levels of the Game (1969), about the 1968 US Open match between Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe. This delivers me to the point that I have been slowly building up to all along, which is that perhaps these paintings are less about tennis than about painting itself.

In a conversation published in the 2021 catalogue 24 Tennis Court Drawings, Wood frames his approach to this series in terms of self-improvement: “The way I think about this is, how can I keep practicing something I like, and continue to get better at it?” These empty tennis courts are spaces for Wood to sharpen a style, to refine a discipline, to practice. To find freedom within a set of constraints. This seems to be what is happening in a trio of new paintings in this show. In Paris Olympics with Crying Girl (2025), Dubai with Nude with Blue Hair (2026), and Hamburg Open with Girl (2026), the mise-en-scène of the studio or the flat field of black background has been replaced by rendered details of Roy Lichtenstein prints (Crying Girl (1963), Nude with Blue Hair (1994), and Girl [from the 1¢ Life portfolio, 1963], respectively). There is something different about these paintings: The frame of the television screen has flattened into the plane of the canvas, the depth of the studio has collapsed into two-dimensional space, and the figure has returned in the graphic but undeniably corporeal form of Lichtenstein’s women. These paintings feel like both part of the series and something entirely new.

The final rule is that there are no rules. A careful student of Wood’s tennis court series will find exceptions to nearly all of the rules I have enumerated in this essay—an errant racket or a jumbo ball. The exceptions become a game within the game. The rules exist, nonetheless, to get you to those fleeting moments when they no longer apply, when you are totally loose and free and open. It is the breaks in the rules that allow the series to generate new energy and encounter new possibilities. Wallace concludes his description of tennis’s enfolding boundary in Infinite Jest as follows: “You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution.”⁷ If someone has written a better single-sentence description of the process of writing or making art, I have never read it.