Tess Jaray b. 1937

Certain sequences of pictures made by Tess Jaray in the late 2000’s, extend the language of painting, existing in a space somewhere between painting and collage. Here Jaray has used computer-guided laser cutting to create a fine lattice of holes in a sheet of paper. This sheet was then uniformly painted with acrylic and applied to a painted panel of the exact same size, such that the edge of the paper is only just visible when seen from the side. This process has left a tiny ridge between the two areas of colour, within which one can see the suggestion of a third colour - the cut edge of the white paper. This delicate extra layer on the surface casts an exceptionally fine shadow onto the panel beneath and so Jaray's completed object sits ambivalently between two and three dimensions, painting and sculpture.

In earlier paintings, such as Many Moments Small Pale Green Fading, 2006, Jaray achieved a similar ‘step’ in the surface by applying laser-cut vinyl shapes directly onto a painted canvas, which were then painted over in a second colour, left to dry, and the vinyl then picked away, very precisely, with a scalpel. Jaray's use of computers was crucial to the creation of all of these works; both for finding the exact combinations of colours she wanted to use, and for generating the shapes and grids which were to be cut from paper and vinyl. The vivid, sometimes discordant, colour combinations in the final 'paintings' retain the intense luminosity they first had on the artist's computer screen.