Jed Payten

@jed_payten

Jed Payten’s (b. 2003, l. Eora/Sydney) work examines themes of negation and control. By shifting pre-existing works through processes of layering, erasure, and uncontrollable intervention, Payten invites entropy into the act of painting. This disruption exposes the artwork to forces beyond the artist's control. The result is not a completed image but a remnant, an artefact that emerges from the deconstruction of the work itself. Payten’s paintings hold traces of their own making through these acts of undoing, revealing a history and memory within their layers.

Through intervention, Payten challenges the authority of his hand and resists notions of a fixed outcome. Embracing uncertainty arising from relinquished control, the artwork becomes its own entity and exists beyond preliminary intentions.

Vibrating surfaces littered with ghostly marks, trembling like static, while dense forms rise and fall, obscuring and revealing. These shifts illuminate the tension between the limits of presence and depth of absence. In a state of flux, rarely fully formed and always restless, this dynamic engages the viewer with an idea of the painting as a living object, one that both conceals and reveals itself.

Jed Payten’s work embodies Raphael Rubinstein's reflection from his 2017 essay “Teresa Serrano: In the Presence of Absence” that "the medium (painting) is also grappling with what remains invisible, with the irremediable absences that are enclosed by its vivid presence." Through acts of layering, erasure, and uncontrollable intervention, Payten’s paintings do not resolve into a fixed image but instead reveal what has been lost or obscured. The artwork becomes a record of its memory, where absence is as vital as presence. In this interplay between visible remnants and invisible erasures, Payten challenges the limits of control, allowing the painting to emerge as an artefact shaped by both what remains and what has disappeared.

View the works: Building 5 1.1, First Floor Gallery