Spanish Door Design Purple 1959

Alfred Jensen’s “Spanish Door Design Purple” is a painting made with thick, tactile oil paint, laid on with a kind of determined exuberance. The texture is everything here. Look at how Jensen builds up these vibrant, almost edible ridges of color! The purple background is like a sea of textured impasto, with all these bright hues swimming within it. The white lines, laid on top, create a grid that's both solid and fragile, like a scaffolding holding the whole thing together. My eye keeps going back to the black diagonals cutting across the composition. They’re so bold, so disruptive, like a rebellious gesture against the order of the grid. Jensen’s work reminds me a bit of Hilma af Klint, especially in the way he uses geometry and color to explore these hidden, spiritual dimensions. But with Jensen, there’s this raw, almost childlike quality to the mark-making. He makes it look so easy. It’s like a reminder that painting is as much about the doing as it is about the seeing.