The Brooklyn Rail

With Bill Jensen’s latest show, A Room of Wisdom, it’s what’s not on the walls that transcends. But don’t confuse absence with emptiness. Steeped as he is in Eastern religions and philosophies, Jensen likely knows that prajñā, or wisdom, is conceived of as an awareness of reality’s inherent lack. Like tantric mandalas activating meditation on phenomena’s true essence, Jensen’s paintings summon deep reflection, his “room of wisdom” filled with an abundance of sublime nothingness.

Among the works included in A Room of Wisdom, several are from Jensen’s ongoing “Wheel Rim Compass” series. With their titular reference to the middle-Tang dynasty artist, poet, and philosopher Wang Wei, in addition to recurring yin-yang motifs—a symbol which first appeared in Jensen’s 1977 painting Redon—Wheel Rim Compass V (For Wang Wei) and Wheel Rim Compass IV (For Wang Wei) (both 2021) most directly evince Jensen’s longstanding connection to Buddhist and Taoist teachings. In the former, Jensen conjures a ghostly form as if emerging from a turbid field of milky white oils. Animated by material gestures of accretion and erasure—the wiping, scraping, pressing of the oils upon and across the canvas—Jensen’s creative process underscores a tension at play between states of becoming and dissolution. The same tension energizes Wheel Rim Compass IV, a densely layered canvas upon which Jensen’s hand is evident—a smear caused by the twist of a palette knife’s blade, tectonic-like crests of clashing oil paints rippling across the surface. But it is also what happens beyond the visible plane of the canvas which equally compels Jensen. A series of three curved colored bars bound the bottom frame of Wheel Rim Compass IV, their form mirroring the circular whole of the painting’s yin-yang. Jensen’s gesture is revelatory. What at first sight appears as a trio of incomplete arcs, reveals itself to signify the full circumference of rings extending beyond the realms of the perceptible. Like the work of great thangka painters from Nepal and Tibet, Jensen’s paintings become catalysts for contemplation beyond what our base sense can apprehend.

Incomplete arcs appear, too, in the large-scale diptych Vastness/Flowing (2020–21). Set against a vibrant field of vivid deep blue hues, twinned curved bars traverse joined panels of linen, summoning their phantom segments, while a variation of Jensen’s favored yin-yang echoes the form of biological cells undergoing mirror mitosis. Dialectics and paradox inform Jensen’s compositions—seen and unseen, observed and intuited—and in Vastness/Flowing, this extends to the possibilities of the figural. For his part, Jensen avowedly eschews any premeditated acts of figuration in his compositions, be it faces or forms as such, but in several works in “A Room of Wisdom,” including Vastness/Flowing, a gathering of cloud-like brushes of white runny oil paint calls to mind Song Dynasty painter Liang Kai’s Immortal in Splashed Ink (ca. 1200) and its depiction of a Taoist “immortal” rendered in the impressionistic, gestural Xieyi style of ink painting.

Whether Jensen is conjuring his own “immortal,” there is little doubt he is referencing one in particular. A pair of works in the show to feature the recurring white form belong to the series “Buddha’s Wind”—a reference, perhaps, to the concept of prāṇa: wind as metaphor for the dharma’s constancy and impermanence. As with Buddha’s Wind I (2020–21) and Buddha’s Wind III (2016), Jensen’s thinned white oil paints, splashed and sponged onto linen, cluster together to form a primitive figure. Set against black backgrounds painted in near invisible shifts of chromatic tonality, the effect is striking. In both works—and for that matter Vastness/Flowing—Jensen adds a solitary vertical line of red running down the right side of the nebulous form. While Jensen avoids speaking of his choice of color—“Color is really too sensitive for me to talk about,” he noted in a 2007 interview with poet John Yau—tellingly, red is a color of significant symbolism in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Symbolizing forces of transformation and subjugation of desires, perhaps most acutely for Jensen’s show, red also represents the conversion of moha, or ignorance, into wisdom. A room of wisdom, indeed.

More than just meditations upon the esoteric, Jensen’s paintings can be understood as means to contemplate the nature of being. Jensen, for his part, would seem to make no case for disabusing this notion. In referencing Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1996 film Andrei Rublev—a cinematic mediation upon the life of a historical fifteenth century Russian orthodox icon painter—Jensen’s diptych Passion According to Andrei (Rublev / Tarkovsky) (2010–11) is representative of his own ongoing search for mystical revelation through artistic endeavors. On the diptych’s left panel, Jensen evokes geological-like forms—dirty outcrops, ragged crevices—shaped by the layering of, and interventions upon, dull, monochromatic oil paints. To the right, barely visible outlines of the same form extend into a chaotic scene, a dense abstract composition marked by broad brushstrokes of several purple shades clouding over smaller swathes of earthy browns and diluted sienna. The effect is one of order and chaos side by side. Yin and yang, if you will.