Jeffrey Cortland Jones is a painter, curator, and professor whose work explores the quiet power of abstraction through subtle shifts of surface, tone, and structure. Based in Southwestern Ohio, Jones works in the lineage of reductive painting, yet his practice resists nostalgia. His restrained palette and deliberate material decisions propose painting as a site of clarity, resistance, and reflection in a culture saturated with noise.
At first glance, Jones’s paintings present themselves as carefully composed slabs of whites, grays, muted greens, and soft blues, occasionally interrupted by what he has called “Tamir Rice Orange.” Their clean surfaces, shallow blocks of acrylic hovering just off the wall, can appear minimal or stoic. But closer looking reveals something far less orderly: surfaces shifting between matte and glossy, layers sanded, buffed, and scraped, edges taped and untaped to expose failure, whites that prove anything but pure. His process rewards patience: what begins as silence unfolds into a complex record of revision, resistance, and surrender.
The horizon where sky and sea meet, graffiti erased by municipal paint patches, the cadence of tire marks on a median, or flecks of metal embedded in a waxy marble ledge battered by skateboards, all become points of reference in Jones’s work. Painting, for him, is a way to slow down, to locate and release, to dwell in the tension between concealment and revelation, collapse and stability, mourning and morning. His paintings embody this paradox: shallow yet deep, restrained yet full, their surfaces shifting with the patience of close, slow looking.
Critics have recognized the understated intensity of his work. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Peter Plagens described Jones’s exhibition at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York as “the best thing in a back room I’ve seen in a long time,” highlighting the resonance of paintings that achieve power not through spectacle but through precision and presence. His work has also been featured in Art LTD, Contemporary Art Review LA, Artmag UK, Widewalls, Arts + Culture, Modern Luxury Interiors Chicago, and New American Paintings.
Jones has presented solo exhibitions at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (New York), Boecker Contemporary (Heidelberg, Germany), Raygun Projects (Toowoomba, Australia), &Gallery (Edinburgh, Scotland), Pratt Institute (Brooklyn), Galleri Urbane (Dallas), Sarah Gormley Gallery (Columbus), and Gray Contemporary (Houston), among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Elmhurst Art Museum (Chicago), Centre d’Art Contemporain (Metz, France), Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (Kyiv), Museum Sankt Wendel (Germany), Saturation Point (London), Cheryl Hazan Contemporary (New York), Lyons Wier Gallery (New York), Skibum MacArthur (Los Angeles), Mini Galerie (Amsterdam), Galerie oqbo (Berlin), the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, The Painting Center (New York), Jamie Brooks Fine Art (Los Angeles), and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia).
He earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Cincinnati and his BFA from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Jones is Professor of Art at the University of Dayton, where he leads the Painting program.
In addition to his studio practice, Jones is an active curator. He has organized exhibitions at galleries and universities across the U.S. and abroad. He is the director of Divisible Projects, an independent exhibition platform dedicated to cross-cultural exchange and experimentation, with a focus on contemporary abstraction.
At the core of his practice lies an attention to painting’s fragile thresholds: when a hard edge softens, when white becomes both warm and cool, when matte turns suddenly glossy, when correction only deepens the failure. Jones is interested in the moment when a stable stack seems about to collapse, when a surface feels shallow yet infinite, when fog obscures but also reveals. His work asks us to linger in these spaces, between holding and letting go, misplacing and finding, where painting becomes not just an object, but an experience of time, presence, and perception.
email : jjones1@udayton.edu
instagram : @jeffreycortlandjones