R. Allen Jensen allows a rare (to me) sighting of his work on Oct. 2, when he opens at the Smith & Valley Smith & Vallee Gallery in Edison, with a reception for the artist Oct. 3, 5-8.
Jensen has been making his deformed scarecrows, ruined collages, deft drawings and ornately framed assemblages for more than 40 years. His paintings are scores for a disaster, giving mourning a shape and sealing it into art. Writing about Jensen’s work in 1969, Tom Robbins (then an art critic), put his finger on the strengths of it, that it has “lyric subtlety” and “pictorial breath” while also being “brutalized, ugly and blatantly erotic.”
(Photo, Harold Hollingsworth)
Brutalized, ugly and erotic are good words to describe Jensen’s nuclear scarecrows. His spindly grotesques have some of the power that gargoyles perched on the entryway ledges of cathedrals must have had for the medieval faithful. They are genuinely frightening.
His assemblage drawings bring unimagined levels of delicacy to the horror of Jensen’s position.
(Photo, Harold Hollingsworth)
Death delicately done becomes a minuet, and the clatter of teacups reminds us of the razor’s edge. Hollingsworth, a former student, wrote this appreciation in 2006.
You spelled Smith & Vallee wrong.
And seeing Bob Jensen’s work is only “rare” if you are one of those big city Hicks- he showed last year at Smith & Vallee, and a couple of years before that he did a residency at the Edison Eye, where he made art in the gallery for a week or two, hanging it as it was finished.
Come to Edison, we got art up here all the time…
But Ries. I am a big city hick.
There are some nice small ones at Lucia-Douglas gallery in Bellingham as well.