In the first half of his life, abstract fine art forefather, world-traveler, multi-linguist and near-polymath Alfred Jensen investigated and practiced just about every aesthetic genre and movement to date—from his fanciful Fauvist figurative paintings to the boogie-woogie gridwork he adapted from modern masters like Mondrian. By the 1950s, Jensen had developed and held firmly to an evolving visionary take on numeric, philosophic and scientific systems until the end of his life three decades later. The massive impasto-covered paintings he created during that period acted like arcane yet ordered truth charts ready for rigorous review. At the same time, they revealed his ingenuous, imperfect, very human touch. While his largely inscrutable work could be read, it was often equally experienced for its visceral entry into any viewer’s sphere, wielding a power to ground abstract ideas into concrete reality. This effect was especially germane to the uncertainties of the postwar outlook, pointing to a deep-seated need for advancement and rule—like new systems and ordering mechanisms, exemplified in everything from the tech-driven international space race to the development of the United Nations and NATO. Of course, today, we are faced with a similar sense of disorder and disarray from gross abundance—of goods, information, power and populations—leaving us to ask what the truth really is in our sometimes artificial, deeply fractured and routinely equivocal world.
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Jensen’s output indirectly influenced multiple generations of vital American artists, including his near-peers, like color field-working Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, as well as the later likes of Minimalist icon Donald Judd, happening progenitor Allan Kaprow and Neo-Dadaist master Jasper Johns. Arguably, the effect of Jensen’s work and the growing desire to reconcile the abounding programmatic, post-industrial languages of his time with that of the artful and the existential, shaped many of the participants in the extraordinary new group exhibition “The Apex Is Nothing.” Echoes of Jensen’s desire for sense-making, as well as its denial, are palpably felt in each of their thinking, vulnerability, expression and artistic production.
Virtually all the artists featured in “The Apex Is Nothing,” from feminist knit-patterned painter Ellen Lesperance to multidisciplinary Black conceptual artist Charles Gaines, address deeply systemic and personal issues—including racism, corporate greed, degenerative disease and sexual discrimination. Yet the work is less demonstrative than you might think. Instead, the artists interrogate our organization of truth—ways that manage and sustain the established and ingrained inequalities and loss looked at now more than ever—and quantify the elements that make up the words and worlds they are a part of. Collectively, they ask: Does today’s inherent discontinuity between supposedly assured systems and their real-world effect deny us truth altogether? Are we left blindly to feel our way through an ever-expanding, deeply entangling, often-illegible mess of a world? Amidst the cacophony, they demand: See me, hear me, believe me. Or do they? I leave that to the art-going audience.
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