Olav Christopher Jenssen (1954) lives and works in Berlin. His retrospective in the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2003), which drew large numbers of visitors, confirmed his international standing. The Galerie Bob van Orsouw is presenting the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland.
Jenssen’s ‘non-representative’ painting upholds an authentic, multi-faceted pictorial language. It reflects an artistic terrain where all the many possibilities of painting can be explored. Without signing up to any particular stylistic direction, Jenssen is constantly creating new series of works. Mostly executed in oils and acrylics, these series (such as Lack of Memory, Time paintings, Biography, Palindrome) are sequences of images which taking process to an extreme tirelessly seek new pictorial solutions. Jenssen paints several pictures simultaneously, continuously varying and testing out the viability of newly uncovered formal principles, layering systems or colours.
Jenssen a ‘painter on the move’ cuts unswervingly through the thicket of tradition, not in order to advance the (self-referential) discourse of painting, but to free himself from it. Swept along by an almost euphoric creative impulse, he produces deeply sensual paintings which neither seek to answer existential issues nor to mediate metaphysical precepts. The dynamics of Jenssen’s painterly statements lies rather in the naturalness with which he practises art as ‘a sublimated form of life, a realised utopia’ (Christoph Schreier). In the same sense that the multiplicity of life cannot be contained with one ordering system for it is incessantly being torpedoed by chance again and again Jenssen finds himself up against unexpected artistic challenges. The logic of his work-immanent development is not about a need for one pictorial solution to lead into the next. As Jenssen has himself said, making a plea for painterly heterogeneity, the ‘next picture doesn’t have to be an affirmation of the previous one’.
Hence it is impossible to discover either thematic or structural links between the individual groups of works, as we see very clearly in the recent series Palindrome. The title refers to those words or phrases which read exactly the same from either direction, forwards or backwards, evoking the same or a different sense. In the works in his own Palindrome, for the first time Jenssen includes words and fragmented phrases in his painting. However, since these are reduced to single letters, they no longer convey any real meaning. Language loses its function as a means of description and explanation. The letters are no longer legible as writing; they have become pictorial elements, horizontal inserts which give a certain rhythm to the painting.
Explosions of colour, areas of over-painting, layers, amorphous forms and sketchlike fragments turn Jenssen’s canvases into complex pictorial spaces, where spatial depths is replaced by a pulsating intensity. Jenssen’s painting operates in the Here and Now, led by present circumstances, events, the daily round, memories, life as it is lived like an unending ‘game’ that also freely pushes back the boundaries of painting into the realms of sculpture. An oval form which recurs in the paintings is worked in clay and stacked like stalagmites in the space yet another successfully liberating tactic on the part of the artist, always seeking to retain his own sense of orientation in the labyrinthine tangle of the (collective) memory of painting.
Birgid Uccia
