The titles of the recent paintings are for the most part derived from movies made by either Ingmar Bergman or Andrei Tarkovsky, filmmakers whose ability to link the subtle shifts in a cold, northern light to the human tragedy slowly unfolding upon a vast, ghost-haunted stage is particularly apt for an artist who grew up in Minnesota. Most of the paintings are divided horizontally into two distinct rectangular zones, which we read as sky and earth. The palette veers from bright, post-apocalyptic tropical, in Stalker (1993-1994), to shifting shades and harsh contrasts in Winter's Light (1994). Jensen seems to concur with Shakespeare's famous metaphor of the world as a stage, but with a twist. For him, the bare canvas is also a stage on which the painter makes something happen, and what happens is a world teeming with potentiality.

The paintings' titles clarify a connection between Jensen, whose paintings have been sculptural in their physicality, and Tarkovsky, who, in his book Sculpting in Time (translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, University of Texas Press, 1986), says of classical Japanese haiku: "Haiku cultivates its images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves and at the same time express so much that it is not possible to catch their final meaning." Jensen, Tarkovsy, and Bergman are not artists who make everything fit into a story but visionary authors for whom narrative is a way of discovering the limits of what can be revealed while approaching what cannot be made visible. As an artist concerned with the relationship between paint's physicality and visual image, Jensen recognizes the films of Bergman and Tarkovsky as explorations of the shifting relationship between the disembodied image and a light both coldly spiritual and warmly erotic, between mysterious presence and disquieting absence.

These are not static landscapes. There is a roughness to them, an inner turbulence which threatens to topple their deceptively simple order. In Colossus (1993-1994), a multi-winged form lurks beneath the layers of ocher sky, filling its expanse, while the blue-green earth below has been churned up by some now-invisible, methodical force. Was the force good or malevolent, man-made or natural? These are questions Jensen leaves unanswered because he himself apparently doesn't know. This is what it means to be a visionary artist: to record faithfully what ones sees without knowing what the thing seen either means or means to say. Consequently, the viewer recognizes first the sky and earth and then slowly notices how much is ominous within the visual order that paint has established over time.

Colossus, 1993-94

In Stalker, Jensen divides the vertical rectangle more or less in half, juxtaposing a lime green rectangle (sky) above a rectangle (landscape) whose acidy hot pinks are reminiscent of both raw flesh and rust. Although the painting is largely composed of two rectangles stacked together, the image does not arrive all at once. The viewer sees and then must begin looking. The green sky's waxy, flesh-like tactility suggests a world caught between ripeness and decay. Yet Jensen's decay lacks the melodrama of Ivan Albright's gloomy hysteria, and his ripeness certainly isn't edenic. Coloristically, the landscape is both tropical and arid, while physically the paint is both voluptuous and barren.

Jensen has not cleared away the stage, and for all the apparent simplicity of the compositions, the paintings are neither reductive nor essentializing. The logic of his paintings is not derived from an external model, pure abstraction, or the grid. In their openness, they have something in common with de Kooning's Pastorale (1963), which the artist did shortly before moving from New York to Long Island. Both men had to clear the decks, to see with fresh eyes. However, whereas de Kooning's paintings from the early 1960s are filled with verticals, Jensen's are largely horizontal. Like de Kooning, Jensen has articulated numerous personal forms while reinventing archetypal ones. In his recent paintings, he has not only let go of the things that once filled his compositions, but he has also moved wholly and decisively into a new dimension. The stage itself has come to life.

Stalker, 1993-94