The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don’t buy love for nothing…
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside, 1986
For TAR Presents, the gallery’s ongoing sequence of individual artist projects, The Artist Room are a showing body of recent paintings by Joseph Jones (b.1985). On view are intimately scaled paintings depicting cats and flowers that are assimilated from the artist’s vast archive of found imagery, in addition to his own drawings and photography.
Immaculately painted with oil on heavy linen, their surface is carefully primed so that the subjects appear with deep sheen and lustre. Much like images produced with film photography – that are beholden to the sensitivity of light and glitches in production – despite their realism, his paintings carry a haze which recalls family photos or archive footage.
Important for Jones is exploring sensitive notions of care, compassion and nurture in contemporary art practice – subtly asking if such approaches have been lost to the conceptualism of art today. Key artists of influence include Gluck; Mary Fedden; Eleonore Koch; Carel Weight; and Jochen Lempert, among others.
Poet and artist Jean Cocteau once said, “I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul,” which – if we can similarly consider flowers – relates to a key question in Jones’s work: “Why are we so connected to cats and flowers?” Domestic, universal, and a marker of a looked-after and welcoming environment, it is how both cats and flowers are at once familiar yet unfamiliar; knowable yet unknowable, which compels us to keep caring for-, looking at–, and being surprised by– them. But, unlike static objects, our fleeting experience depends on an unpredictable exchange the result of our consideration and effort. Sometimes, you get what you give. As Burroughs says: You don’t buy love for nothing…
“I like the paintings to feel like you are looking through a window,” Jones observes. “Perhaps seeing your own reflection”.