House of Seiko is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by New York–based artist Jay Payton. This series deepens Payton’s investigation into how images form, blur, and reorganize within perception. Moving between abstraction and representation, the paintings feel simultaneously familiar and elusive, hovering in the space where recognition begins to shift.
Payton works from memory rather than direct observation, distilling fleeting impressions—a passing figure, a sliver of architecture, a particular quality of light—into concentrated arrangements of form and color. Geometric structures intersect with atmospheric passages, producing compositions that carry traces of lived experience while remaining open to interpretation. Throughout the work, spatial compression and subtle optical tension create images that echo both external environments and psychological interiors.
Color is central to this new body of work. Ranging from muted earth tones to incisive yellows and reds, Payton’s palette establishes an emotional rhythm across the exhibition. Thin veils of pigment meet dense, assertive shapes, generating a dynamic interplay between delicacy and solidity. While some canvases gesture toward figural presence, these forms remain deliberately unresolved, suspended in states of partial emergence.
Light serves as an organizing principle in the paintings—an internal pulse rather than an illustrative device—stabilizing compositions even as their spatial logic remains intentionally unsettled.
Across the exhibition, Payton merges formal rigor with psychological nuance, offering paintings that function less as depictions than as distilled environments shaped by memory, tension, and mood. Jay Payton: New Paintings invites viewers into a space of oscillation—between clarity and ambiguity, surface and depth—affirming the enduring capacity of painting to hold emotional complexity and the fleeting residues of experience.
Jay Payton (b. 1992) is a painter living and working in New York. His work contemplates the development of human experience through research into biology, anthropology, technology, and a wide range of related subjects. Using both traditional and nontraditional materials, he explores how abstract painting can be visualized in the 21st century and beyond. Recent solo exhibitions include A Gentle Kiss to the Anterior Fontanelle (Seaview, Los Angeles, 2025) and The Infinitesimal Man and His Ephemeral Existence (Gern en Regalia, New York, 2024). Recent group exhibitions include No Diagnosis: Drawings by Painters (Reena Spaulings, New York, 2025), In Media Res (Derosia, New York, 2025), and Naked City (Silke Linder, New York, 2024). Payton received his MFA from CCA, San Francisco, and his BFA from Georgia State University, Atlanta, and is the recipient of awards including the Barclay Simpson Award, the RITE Edition Scholarship, and the Leroy Hoffberger School of Painting Scholarship.