Crazy-quilt dynamism

Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol are more famous than Alfred Jensen. But the eccentric painter, who was born in 1903 and died in 1981, ranks right up there with them as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Anytime Jensen’s jam-packed expanses of brightly colored numbers, symbols and shapes are exhibited, it’s worth driving across town (or farther) to see them. Every minute spent in the presence of these profoundly optimistic paintings is rejuvenating, even downright inspiring.

Jensen spent his maturity pursuing life’s deepest secrets. What he left behind are giant, mind-blowing diagrams that not only record his discoveries but also reveal them by inviting viewers to experience them. It’s the best sort of pedagogy: teaching by example.

“Alfred Jensen: Concordance” was organized by Lynne Cooke, curator of New York’s Dia Center for the Arts, where it appeared last year. Currently installed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, it consists of only nine paintings, but one is 25 feet long, another is 30 and a third is more than 31 feet. All are between 6 and 8 feet tall. As a group, they resemble crazy quilts made by a mad scientist with an eye for dynamic designs, a love of big-picture thinking and a taste for esoteric coincidences.

Where paranoid folks spin such seemingly inconsequential details into elaborate theories of nefarious conspiracies, Jensen never oversimplifies. Equally skeptical of single-issue explanations and all-encompassing systems, he superimposes references to Greek architecture, Maya astronomy and Egyptian numerology on the thickly painted surfaces of his works, alongside elements of Goethe’s color theory, the “I Ching,” Newtonian physics and modern optics. The results are deliciously complicated constellations of color, texture, shape and text. All make visual if not logical sense. Each demonstrates that chaos and order are two sides of the same coin and that serendipity is worth its weight in gold.

Jensen’s paintings fall into three groups: charts, abstract patterns and fusions of the two. The first includes four canvases: the single-panel “Parthenon” (1962), the two-panel “Remote Sensing, Per I & II” (1979), the three-panel “Physical Optics” (1975) and the four-panel “Crossing the Equator” (1977). In each, carefully graphed data or scientific diagrams are laid out on color-coordinated backgrounds. Jensen masterfully plays bilateral symmetry against off-balance whimsy, creating idiosyncratic compositions whose wacky syncopations give way to pulsating harmonies.

“Parthenon” follows the simplest format: a painting set within a painting, set within another painting. “Physical Optics” is structured as if it were a house of mirrors. Its deceptively simple geometry, adorned with arrows pointing in every direction, allows Jensen to rearrange the spectrum 14 ways. His versions make nature’s rainbows seem like prototypes in need of refinement.

The other two works in this group feature rows and columns of numbers. Sometimes their sums, added vertically and horizontally, form the basis of second sets of relationships, whose proportions both correspond to the first set and give birth to a third. At other times, Jensen’s numbers seem to scroll by with dizzying speed, as if they were the offspring of a complex computer code and a slot-machine’s spinning images.

The two paintings that make up the second group are entirely made up of abstract shapes. “Square II Growth” (1968) is a perfectly symmetrical two-panel piece of four concentric squares bisected by a pair of diagonal lines. Despite being locked into the picture plane, its solid blocks of red, yellow, blue, black and white spin like pinwheels, clockwise and counterclockwise.

Even more dazzling is the four-panel “Reciprocal Relation Per I-IV” (1969), a 15-foot-long diptych whose checkerboard patterns create optical conundrums and conceptual puzzles. Each half is structured like a photographic negative of its partner.

But Jensen includes too many inconsistencies among his pairs of secondary and tertiary colors for one side to appear to be the cause of, or template for, the other. Each maintains its independence while amplifying the other’s power.

The third group is made up of three show-stopping masterpieces. With six, eight and 12 panels, respectively, “A Quadrilateral Oriented Vision, Per I-VI” (1960), “Where the Gods Reside, Per I-VIII” (1968) and “The Great Pyramid” (1980) combine the diagrammatic symbols of the first group with the visual pyrotechnics of the second to form over-the-top extravaganzas. In them, logic pirouettes around its opposite.

Each of these insanely ambitious paintings consists of four to six systems that organize time, space, matter, thought, language and vision into the neat, repeatable units that facilitate comprehension and communication.

In Jensen’s hands, no single system provides the key that discloses a work’s ultimate significance. Rather than hiding the secret of his art’s meaning among his densely interwoven codes, he locates it squarely on the shoulders of viewers. Curiosity -- about the universe and our place in it -- is the life force that drives Jensen’s endlessly fascinating works, and empowers us to enter their world. The more deeply you dig into it, the more meaning you get out of it.

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“Alfred Jensen: Concordance”

Where: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica

When: Closed Sundays and Mondays

Ends: April 19

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 586-6488