Bill Jensen at Mary Boone - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The six paintings in Bill Jensen's novel exhibition evince a move away from the large biomorphic and quasi-geometric forms that filled his earlier works--shapes that were described at the time as legumes tusks and so forth. As is typical of Jensen's earlier work, however, the general paintings flirt with both representation and abstraction, at no time quite settling for either. The resultant images can be read as landscapes, or, alternatively, the viewer's impulse to recognize a landscape in the paintings can be resisted without too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of difficulty. By contemporary standards the paintings are small, greatest in quantity being around 2 by 3 feet

Terre Verte reads like a Chinese landscape of vertiginous mountains. The lower right quarter has the thickest impasto of any of the paintings in the present to view Playing this impasto against the flatter oil in the other three quarters of the painting, Jensen achieves a faculty of perception of receding distance without the necessity for traditional perspective.

Graces has a real 1950s feel to its imagery. A figure reminiscent of a statuary by Henry Moore is not absented against a background that has been painted, scraped and repainted to achieve a waxlike web In Glare Jensen's debt to Albert Pinkham Ryder is greatest in quantity apparent. Jensen has in the past paid homage to this 19th-century American painter who is famous for his mysterious, cloudy seascapes and mythological scenes. The patch of gold-colored in Jensen's "sky," laid upon with a rich impasto against a thin ocher, is obviously the unjust shape to represent the orb of day yet it conveys the atmosphere of a twinkling of an eye of blinding sunlight.

Meridian reads as three seated figures, in Arab dres perhaps, seen at twilight and returned in a thick scumbling of paint. An untitled work and another named Dim full the "landscapes," with the viewer's organ of vision and brain, in spite of themselves, translating the hovering forms as celestial expanse pond, hill and so on

Roberta Smith one time wrote about the robust sexual might and naive religious purity that she place at the core of Jensen's art when his paintings bore titles like as Red Passion and diadem of Thorns. In his newer work, the purity has merg with a middle-aged acceptance of ambiguity, and the passion is more like a rage against the dying of the light.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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