Joseph Jones’s first New York exhibition, presented at Chapter NY until 21st February, features amazing works. Bringing together a new group of paintings, the show celebrates slowness and surface over spectacle, positioning itself as a meditation on how images are made.

Jones works at an intimate scale, placing his paintings at the intersection of portraiture and still life. His recurring subjects, cats and flowers, are meticulously rendered. Rather than direct observations, they are staged and embellished in ways that echo the logic of digital image-making. Like a pet owner arranging a photograph, Jones selects environments and details less for narrative than for painterly tension.

In Gold cat, the glossy satin of an Adidas tracksuit forms a slick backdrop against which the animal’s white fur appears almost implausibly soft. Human figures are largely absent, yet remain implicit throughout the work.

Jones’s process, priming, painting and sanding back to expose the linen weave, produces a distinctive result. In Cat in rainbow light, the subject feels vividly there, almost photograph-like. This vibrancy of colours extends to the flower paintings, which depict blooms on leather (Pillion reference anyone?) at their moment of fullest intensity. Their heightened realism tips into Surrealism.

A literary reference surfaces in White cat with gemstones, which recalls the jewelled tortoise in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884). Jones’s gems, however, are plastic stickers, mass-produced and childlike. They do not overwhelm the cat but instead glitter outward. And is that a Queer reference?

Jones lives and works in Sussex, UK, and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010. Seen in New York for the first time, his paintings gives mystery and moments of contemplation.