I notice something in my thinking and writing about the fine arts: a kind of… drama. Sometimes it’s richly on point, but it’s so consistent that I occasionally wonder about its grounding.
Like, is persistent and returning seriousness an effective foundation for approaching the arts, thinking about them as communications made by real-world individuals, who are very… unpredictable? Honestly, I might just be self-conscious about the seriousness because of how much I see it elsewhere. But is that seriousness actually realistic? Sometimes the daily experience of living is much more wide-ranging. It’s uncertain. Staccato and all over the place.
There’s a frequent expectation, I think, for discussions of the fine arts — painting, sculpture, etc. — to be explanatory or revealing in some big way. And yet, I recognize the substance of so much of what we’re all talking about as flouting the prospect of a precise, direct explanation.
So, what actually is the… revelation of it? You have to stand sometimes before something and admit when you don’t know how to fully delineate the nature and expanse of it. But, crucially, that doesn’t mean you don’t know something of it. You can still sense it.
In the powerful art from Bill Jensen in a new exhibition at the art gallery Amanita in New York City, that existentially embedded uncertainty becomes volatile. It churns and consumes. The imagery, thinking about it now, strikes me as capturing the fleshy, organic machinery of our lived worlds kicking into gear — which is, often, actually a very messy process. In this art, we also see, though, the background — areas of painted upheaval resting against and under the weight of more stable areas of color, everything moving into the space held by what’s adjacent.
In the art, the acute, fleshy, tangible, sensory, and fleeting became a relationship — still very much in front of us, but reaching outside of the type of confine we’d ordinarily expect.
That struck me throughout the exhibition. We see, in these images, painted communication, holding the sensed mess of living alongside quietude and security, even if that serenity itself ends up running up against limits — like, on a very basic level, the edge of the painted surface.
If you look long enough, you can imagine Jensen’s applications of oil paint — some of it suggestive of form, but often defying the prospect of direct interpretation — growing in front of you, like something organic; alternatively, their appearance might be the product of decay. Maybe we’re (not literally, but bear with me here) looking at the result of something having been left to its own embedded processes and whatever it would encounter for a period of time long enough that specifics like its origin and its associated intentions aren’t even clear anymore. But it’s still alive.
It still offers genuine space — clear opportunity outside the familiar. You don’t have to recognize, but you begin to feel like looking is enough, and even definitive.
And that feels like life, in the sense of artistically approximating a shared, animating force that I think goes beyond mere biological systems. Above our biologies, we’re inwardly drawn together, and though I’m fascinated by the prospect of conventional, contemporary science beginning to explain some of what for now sounds so esoteric, I think we know it in the meantime, the more. It’s real continuance — captured skillfully in oil paint on linen.
You do get some sense of form in Jensen’s paintings, but these forms — these individualized areas of vivacity — are intermingling and persistently developing. Even within themselves, the applications of color often aren’t total, leaving the inverse — negative space, one might call it — visible and incorporated into what we’re looking at. It’s often taken up by other color.
These respective applications of color maintain individuality, the energy pushing each one forward distinct from what pushes everything else on each surface forward. We might not know… yet, but we really can see.
Jensen’s art asks us to consider the other. The other time, the other place, the other memory, the other opportunity, the other plane. And the art asks us to see that “other” presence in point after point across these creations. In our lives outside the painted surfaces towards which these artworks point, are we really so alone? Or is the rest somehow also here?
Bill Jensen: “A Room of Wisdom” closed at Amanita yesterday, on June 15. Thank you to the gallery for their assistance in putting together this article.
