Bill Jensen

(Washburn, March 5–March 29, 1986)

After Freud gave definition to the machinary of the mind's working, artists began to come up with visual interpretations. In this country, Ryder, Hartley, Dove, O'Keeffe, made paintings that pioneered the language necessary to visually communicate the looking inside rather than out. Their compositions and images arose out of the need to give expression to an entirly new circumstance, not merely a scene.
   Bill Jensen continues this interior landscape tradition building further with the vocabulary his predecessors have established. Some of his canvases, Fragile (1982–4), Ribbon for Harriet (1976–84), are like probes deep into our psyche. They establish images and the zone for the process of reflection. They're like a look back into the chambers of memory. They reveal the mechanism of our private brooding. Freeze the action of a psychological tour.
   In other paintings, like Denial (1983–6) and Guy and the Loon (1984–5), we arrive at a location though it's not quite geographic. In these he gives demension to abstract forms. These canvases seem to be details culled from a nightmare where the images are decipherable only enough to instill terror and helpless confusion. The signpost are black warnings .
   This isn't all as gruesome as might be inferred. Though the colors are most often dark, as if we're seeing the last reaches of light, his delineations are clear and precise. Paint is thick and heavy, crowding colors and anxious brushwork to a fervor of activity, yet he retains total control of the elements and steers the window to where all is in cleanest focus. The surfaces are much worked; a tremendous amount of effort visible, though it's the result not the effort we key in on.
   Jensen also has on view upstairs at the gallery a suite of etchings called "Endless," recently shown at MOMA, and a number of charcoal drawings and paintings prepatory to the work downstairs. The etchings (printed by Universal Limited Art Editions on beautiful handmade paper by John Koller) show more of an exploration than an arrival, while the charcoal drawings contain much power and energy even further realized in the paintings.

(ARTS, May 1986)