Jay Payton: A Gentle Kiss to the Anterior Fontanelle

Sea View, Los Angeles, through 29 March

​​‘This exhibition is a glance into the beginnings of the Homo sapien’, Brooklyn-based artist Jay Payton writes in the press release for his solo show A Gentle Kiss to the Anterior Fontanelle. Suffused with primeval greens and pelagic blues, the abstract paintings displayed here exude a pensive, implosive energy, registering less the grand gestures of a body moving in space than the intense buzzing of a mind lost in thought. Influenced early on by the work of Anselm Kiefer at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, where he grew up, Payton often layers oil paint with other media – paper, aluminium – on surfaces ranging from canvas to cardboard, to create bryophytic bursts of mottled colour and moody impasto. The title of his exhibition at Sea View references the soft spots on infants’ heads that allow their skull bones to shift as they pass through the birth canal, and some of the paintings there – The Process of Human Embryonic Evolution (all works 2025), When the Water Breaks – reference the science of biological reproduction. Meanwhile, American Sterilization, a wall-based sculptural installation featuring a naked, scowling baby doll framed in barbed wire alongside two airsoft rifles and a bag of fake cash, evokes the carceral system, gun violence and the historical use of forced sterilisation as a tactic of racial subjugation, existential obstacles against which life and its nurturers nevertheless persist. Jenny Wu