Regen Projects is pleased to announce The Adult Light, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with the Berlin- and New York-based artist Sergej Jensen. This presentation brings together oil painting on linen assemblages which foreground the relational possibilities of painting’s surface and background.

Since the early aughts, Jensen has been known for his laconic handling of materials which, combined with an embrace of accidents, irregularities, and material idiosyncrasies, demand the viewer to consider how a painting can represent both the process of its own creation and the world at large. Stitching together scraps of wool, silk, linen, and burlap as if they were brushstrokes, he both invokes and questions the formal methodology of the stretched canvas and the painterly gesture. At first glance austere, his assemblages are rife with visual wisecracks and wry, materialist critiques.

For this latest exhibition, Jensen continues his exploration of layering and removing as a process. Oil paint, applied with varying thickness and technique, neither conceals nor transcends the sewn canvas. Instead, it is cannibalized into the canvas to form a hybrid surface-object that mobilizes texture, dimension, and opticality all at once. What emerges is a series of works that take up the atmospheric qualities of light—a night spent on the terrace, a concert, the sun coming through the curtain, a lamp in the evening, a piece of plastic, an askew projection.

“The materials in Jensen’s work take on a life of their own and come to define the picture. The visible traces become painterly gestures, and painterly gestures appear to be traces. Front sides turn into backs, below into above, right into left. The picture itself determines the composition. The apparent autarky of the works lends them a hint of character, and so the impression is not far off that it is not just us looking at the pictures: they are observing us, too.”

— Susanne Pfeffer, “Sergej Jensen’s Cinema of Titles” in Sergej Jensen (Distanz, 2011)