Courtesy Galerie Neu, Berlin

Sergej Jensen, "Untitled," 2007. Linen, 31 ½ x 27 ½ in.

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What is it about the Berlin-based abstract painter Sergej Jensen that has elicited the recent spilling of so much belletristic ink? Perhaps it’s that his apparently anarchic practice — which incorporates spills, stains, sewing and tears on linen, silk, wool, used money bags, and other materials — manages to both disavow and affirm the relevance of painting in equal measure. Or perhaps it’s that his work lets us off the merely optical hook by virtue of its conceptual rhetoric, allowing people like me to rankly indulge in the aesthetic hedonism of my AbEx origins. Whatever the case may be, it is hard not to be charmed by this survey of some 40-odd primarily abstract paintings and one film. Techniques and materials vary as widely as the modernist masters they invoke, while the tradition of paint on canvas (scarcely in evidence) cedes to a preference for dyed jute, applied in collagelike form to canvas or sewn together in big, color-field strips, all of which lends the exhibition a wholesome, earthy feel. At times Jensen trumps his own references, as in one small work, Untitled (2008), in which a small, seemingly accidental tear on a black stitched-together piece of cotton on a stretcher could be a quaint solution to Clyfford Still’s ponderous lack of verve. By the same token, Jensen proves that, given the history of art’s total saturation with paint and the enduring equation of reference-equals-content, the Midas touch can potentially be had by anyone, as long as they have the right eye.

"Sergej Jensen" is a web exclusive published in conjunction with the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters''s December 2008 / January 2009.