In Ashes to Ashes some drips of red paint at the bottom of the canvas have a clarity of shape that I don't think I have ever seen in dripped paint before. Dripped painting generally evokes Abstract Expressionism and the automatist experiments of the Surrealists, but in Ashes to Ashes one's thoughts about such precedents are grounded in the specifics of those spots of color. While there might be a suggestion that this is the red of blood, the suggestion is not sentimental, because the weight of each of the drops is so warily observed. Jensen's painterly moves have metaphorical payoffs. Like most contemporary artists who manage to draw us into their work, Jensen both constructs and inhabits his own theoretical universe.
Theories suggest expanding perspectives.
For as long as the best contemporary artists are all living in their own homemade theoretical universes, the art world as a whole is going to feel confused, adrift. It is disturbing that nobody seems able to come up with a theory that can account for anything but his or her own work, that there is nothing to do but go from oasis to oasis. Perhaps all interpretation brings with it such a danger. In the past several decades, certainly, theorists and appreciators have been on a collision course. Appreciators are so concerned with the fictional integrity of the work of art that they sometimes just assume that it means nothing, rather than risk taking the work apart in order to find out.