Joseph Jones (b. 1985, London, UK) received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2010). Jones produces detailed paintings of cats and flowers that explore sensitive notions of care, compassion, and nurture. Intimately scaled and meticulously detailed, Jones’s paintings sit between portraiture and still life, acting both as mirrors of self-reflection and windows onto the nature of contemporary representation in the digital age. Jones constructs his subjects from composites drawn from his vast archive of found and shared photographs, interrupting the frantic circulation of images to instead prompting a slower reading. Using a layered technique of priming, painting and then sanding back to expose the linen weave, the artist posits a tension between surface and image, illusion and material. Through a colour palette at once subtle and saturated, Jones implies the dream-like quality of representation, the unreal or surreal quality of photorealism. Working serially with domestic images, Jones’s vernacular explores the relationship between sentimentality and obsession, and how structures of belief and interspecies bonds might reveal our own longing.