Sergej Jensen

Although he currently utilizes crafty techniques like knitting and sewing, Sergej Jensen’s allegiance is to technology. Jensen, whose mother is a computer programmer, began in photorealism, a practice that is itself computer-like in its ideals of technical perfection. This background establishes the foundation for the artist’s recent, less literal output. Like the coded ones and zeroes that translate into pictures on a screen, Jensen combines square and rectangular textile remnants to build visual patterns. While the technological ethos maintains that the sum is greater than its parts (with unglamorous digits becoming spectacular images), Jensen exposes the crudeness of his elements alongside their strength as compositions. In his “paintings”—a term that he applies, like Rosemarie Trockel, to works that value stitches as highly as brushstrokes—Jensen arranges pieces of stained secondhand fabrics and adds his own painted marks to develop forms that are not aleatory, despite their roughhewn and spontaneous appearance. Though it seems as if Jensen has splattered an expressionist doodle on Work VI, 2005, the swirl is actually a meticulous reconstruction of a burn on aluminum foil. The tension between form and anti-form is especially apparent in XXXX Deco, 2005, where he has used a solution of bleach and dye to make successions of lines that bisect the canvas and arc across it, simultaneously erasing and adding color to its surface. Such binary codes (background and foreground, intentional and random) give Jensen’s work a self-canceling, dynamic quality, which allows him to project simple images from complex parts.