In the works presented at Pièce Unique, Gardner addresses the canons of classicism in painting, from the “still life” to “the artist’s self-portrait with easel”. The result is as surreal as it is familiar.

In Sacred Sleep, a brick-coloured table with legs reminiscent of Escher’s never-ending staircases sets the stage for a subtly autobiographical still-life scene. As the artist explains, recently becoming the father of twins - and the sleep deprivation that ensued - has made both him and his partner completely rethink the importance of sleep. The fine line between conscious and unconscious, dream and reality becomes gloriously blurred and is transposed onto this canvas: deceptively recognizable, each element is infused with an aura of ambiguity.

At the center of the composition, a feminine figure with her back to the viewer, seemingly asleep, and strangely small as she somehow fits on the table, could either be the subject from whose mind this dream-like scene emerges, or part of the fantasy. The green pattern-like motif of nude hips at the back of the scene - or perhaps above it all - creates an even stronger sense of bizarre familiarity, like a moving film strip, rolling in a loop in the back of the mind as an unconscious erotic vision.

Peeking at the viewer from the back of a stretched canvas - which takes up more than half of the painting’s surface - the artist, albeit positioned at the center of Still Life Painter, appears only tentatively as the subject of this bustling composition. Astutely, Jonathan Gardner guides the viewer’s gaze from one element to the next, each one framing the painter’s blue silhouette.

The eye travels from an oval red table, up a thin light-blue curtain, to a large green vase and yellow paintbrushes resting on an orange table, to a lilac unstretched canvas, and back again to the large, cross-shaped wooden panels at the back of the mysterious canvas.

Drawn into the painting by the figure’s deep, straightforward gaze, it becomes unclear if the subject of the work in progress is the still life on the little red table, or perhaps the viewer, caught unawares. In both canvases, deceptively familiar scenes bare a delightful sense of unresolved mystery, lending the viewer a helping hand into the realm of Jonathan Gardenr’s ingenious reconstructions of the imagination.