ART REVIEWS : The Harmonious Universe of Alfred Jensen

“My father is strong and good because he paints solar energy,” Alfred Jensen’s son once wrote in a school essay. Solar energy wasn’t the half of it. A perpetual student of obscure systems of knowledge, Jensen researched ancient numerological systems, color theory and physics in order to make sense of the world. His art was a painstakingly constructed allegory of a harmonious universe.

Jensen filled large canvases with patterns of small, tactile squares of color squeezed right from the tube. Frequently, row upon row of neatly aligned numerals and terse, mysterious remarks in flowing script slice through the pillows of paint.

The centerpiece of a show of Jensen’s work from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s at Linda Cathcart Gallery, “Seeking to Unravel the Shape of an Enzyme,” extends 15 feet in length. Its rows of mathematical formulas are piled on top of each other to create a dense embroidery of impenetrable evidence.

Although Jensen, who died in 1981, shares the nutty obsessiveness of some folk artists, he was well aware of the art of his time--he showed with some of the abstract expressionists--and studied briefly with theoretical painter Hans Hofmann. In 1957, after several years of painting under the influence of Goethe’s theory of color, Jensen developed his characteristic checkerboard patterning and began adding handwritten notes.

Over the years, the works became larger, more complex and less rough-and-ready. But the uneven, “handmade” quality persisted, giving the dense and dazzling paintings a jazzy life force that is as hard to resist as the underlying structure of rarefied ideas is to puzzle out.

Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to May 26. Body and Soul: Bedsheets--containers for bodies that make love, excrete fluids, renew themselves in sleep and rest eternally in death--are carriers of potent metaphors in “Stained Sheets/Holy Shroud,” a group show at Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art. Although the bedsheet image doesn’t figure in some of the the pieces, they all ultimately are concerned with intimate traces left by the body.

Two hanging sheets with inner edges stained red, pinned together to leave a gaping oval slit, form a massive, rawly vulnerable vaginal image in Mike Kelley’s “Wound.”

An embroidery hoop is fixed on a gauzy sheet hung from a bed frame in Nancy Davidson’s “Letters.” The hoop acts like a magnifying glass, making visible the faint image of an envelope on a few taut square inches of the sheet. The body’s excretions seem to be understood here as a secret, encoded message, emphasizing the privacy of a woman’s private experience.

On separate muslin sheets, Kiki Smith sews the outlines of bodily systems (nerves, arteries, etc.) of a giant figure in simple running stitches. The translation of scientific imagery into ponderous domestic craft on a mammoth scale suggests a desire to erase the barriers between privileged and personal information about the body.

Curtis Mitchell stains the center of a round white tablecloth with ketchup, which leaves irregular brown stains that look like the surface of the moon. A stupid domestic accident, amplified and obsessively embellished, ironically becomes a vehicle for “artistic” image-making.

Other work is by Jonathan Borofsky (a minutely detailed etching of his enlarged footprint, which assumes landscape-like proportions) and Jeffrey Vallance, who wryly memorializes the death of a supermarket chicken.

Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, to May 19. Space Oddities: Tim Hawkinson’s peculiar little objects are bursting with high-concept ideas that sometimes seem too glib for their own good. But among the 18 pieces at Ace Gallery are a few that retain an ineffable oddity, a cockeyed viewpoint about the imperfections and pitfalls of perception.

“Untitled (White Flexing Painting)” is one of these. It’s a Lycra-covered square with an unseen electric motor that enables it to keep making tiny “stretching” movements, as if it felt too uncomfortable to hang on the wall under the scrutiny of viewers. The image amusingly suggests the unfixed, shifting array of meanings an art object possesses in an era of cultural relativism.

The gallery also is showing a vast array of recent work by Dennis Oppenheim and large-scale paintings by David Amico--food for another column.

Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., to June 30.