Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read

Bill Jensen’s exhibition of recent paintings at Cheim and Read stakes a claim to the resplendent. One of the first artists to make their studio in the gritty de-industrialized sections of Williamsburg, Jensen’s art has long referenced strains of American Modernism that view nature as sacred. His early paintings of biomorphic forms painted in earthen colors had one foot in Marsden Hartley’s Maine and another in Brooklyn’s version of organic urban blight. Over the past ten years, Jensen’s palette has moved away from the soil to a hot house orchid lush, with oranges, tangerine and sapphires that predominates his midsized canvases. Moving away from the nature-shape inflection of his earlier paintings, Jensen’s painting over the last decade used brush-marks as compositional anchors. Thrust and direction gave each painting planar space and architectural chambers for the eye to travel.

Jensen’s new paintings offers a departure. The artist has assembled his canvases into diptychs and triptychs, often of incongruent sized surfaces, adding considerable scale, and toning down his palette to autumnal pale whites, tans, browns and a deep rich purple. Eschewing the richness of his past painting’s chromatic intensity does not sacrifice their pictorial effectiveness. Instead, the new paintings provide a tonal and chromatically hushed experienced. Brush-marks no longer create unified composition, instead forms float atop the picture plane and splotches of collage-like paint stitch the surface together.  Titles such as, ‘The Trinity’, ‘Song of Songs’ and ‘Begot’ insinuate a turn of mind. Moving away from an ‘exterior’ optically sumptuous chroma, Jensen’s new works posit an interior, ineffable space for contemporary painting. Jensen’s new palette, while not intrinsically ‘spiritual’, offers a starkness that affords greater contemplation and inwardness. Deliberately referencing painting’s long tradition of religious representation, from Andrei Rublev, Italian altarpieces and Mark Rothkos’s Chapel, Jensen’s painting world becomes a grace note to that tradition. Jensen’s painting, like all painting that attempts to speak of the unutterable, can only be offered as an oblation. Inchoate, Jensen’s new images offers a prelapsarian vision of painting.  

Bill Jensen
THE TRINITY 2010-11
Oil on linen, triptych
53 x 120 inches overall

134.6 x 304.8 centimeters overall

Bill Jensen
ORACLE BONES III 2009-10
Oil on linen
20 x 28 inches

Bill Jensen
BEGOT 2004-10
Oil on linen
60 x 40 inches

Bill Jensen
DOGAN 2011
Oil on linen
40 x 32 inches

Bill Jensen
SUBSTANCE, SPIRIT & SHADOW (T'AO CH'IEN 7TH C) 2010-11
Oil on linen, triptych
55 x 126 1/2 inches overall
139.7 x 321.3 centimeters overall

Bill Jensen
MANDATE OF HEAVEN 2010-11
Oil on linen, triptych
56 1/2 x 123 1/2 inches overall
143.5 x 313.7 centimeters overall

Bill Jensen
PASSIONS ACCORDING TO ANDREI (RUBLEV/TARKOSKY) 2010-11
Oil on linen, diptych
53 1/2 x 78 1/2 inches overall
135.9 x 199.4 centimeters overall

Bill Jensen
BLACK SORROW (I) 2010-11
Oil on linen
53 x 42 inches
134.6 x 106.7 centimeters

Bill Jensen
BOOK OF SONGS II 2010-11
Oil on linen, diptych
58 x 42 inches, large panel
147.3 x 106.7 centimeters, large panel
54 x 44 inches, small panel
137.2 x 111.8 centimeters, small panel

Bill Jensen
LUOHAN (HUNGRY GHOSTS) 2011
Oil on linen
32 x 28 inches
81.3 x 71.1 centimeters