Spanish Door Design Purple 1959

Alfred Jensen made “Spanish Door Design Purple” with paint, I'm guessing oil, and lots of it. I can just picture him, troweling on the viscous pigment, one colour right next to the other. It’s purple, right, but not just purple. I love the way Jensen makes you feel like you’re looking at a diagram, but what it diagrams is anybody’s guess. You can see him trying to systematize the intuitive, bringing order to chaos, or maybe the other way around? He’s a bit like Hilma af Klint that way; both trying to make sense of the cosmic soup by capturing it with paint. Look at the edges of those clunky black lines. The way they quiver and wobble gives it that human, handmade feel. It’s easy to look at a thing like this and get lost in the math of it all. But I think Jensen’s paintings are more like feelings, intuitions, messy and unresolved. And that’s what makes them sing.