Jonas Dehnen (DE) makes paintings, drawings and occasionally sculptures. His work emerges out of a prolonged process of layering, erasure, and the repurposing of underlying image fragments. The 18th century phenomenon of ornamental hermits and imagery mined from the wider romantic tradition often serve as a spark of initiation. They also deputise as an allegory for the often fraught (and sometimes absurd) situation of a young artist. The practice may be regarded as the gradual assembly of an inventory of characters and meanings within a personal visual idiolect. Jonas also brings together disparate visual elements from the communities that he grew up amongst. This process takes place in the entanglement between the physical material of a painting and the image within it. Thinking and doing collapse into one another to become a singular mode of being in the world. The works are maps of themselves, map and territory both, thought-maps looping back into themselves in an infinite regression. They make a sport of navel-gazing, knowing (or is it hoping?) that as long as we all have navels we can all relate.