Ascending I 1958

Alfred Jensen made this painting called Ascending I with thick stripes of vivid color—red, yellow, blue, black, and white—laid on in rectangular formations. I imagine Jensen, brush in hand, carefully building up each stripe, responding to the colors already laid down, kind of like a colourful game of Tetris. There's a real materiality to this painting, the thick paint almost sculptural, a testament to the physicality of the medium itself. The stripes aren’t just colors; they’re gestures, decisions frozen in time, almost like brushstrokes. Looking at this, I think about other painters who explored color and geometry, like Sean Scully or Agnes Martin. Artists are always riffing off each other, having this long, ongoing conversation across time. But what makes this painting special is its ambiguity, its openness to interpretation. Is it a map? A code? A purely abstract composition? It’s all of those things, and none of them, really. Painting’s not about answers, it’s about questions, about the endless possibilities of seeing and thinking.