Jenssen’s work engages an expressionist palette of secondary colors; curious and unconventional uses of fluorescent pinks, pallid tan-browns, piercing yellows, and deep forest greens. While his work regularly involves dense layers of paint worked onto the canvas, Jenssen will sometimes finish a piece with a single line gesture. He often begins with a simple shape, perhaps a color-filled oval in the top right hand corner of the canvas. At times that is enough, and the piece is complete, other times the painting calls for another shape. This adding on is what leads Jenssen to multiplying spheres, sunken webs, faded lines and cryptic letters—all hidden secrets of the picture plane. In part, these encoded canvases conceal references to an expansive history of abstract art.

Jenssen’s work is at once a playful and intimate gesture of human experience. With intuitive sensitivity, he constructs layers upon layers depicting the space between language and the pictorial. Through this process of multi-layering, Jenssen has achieved a translucent depth of field, overlaying organic forms, smears, scratches and scribbles. As a rule, his works develop in series, focusing on specific formal constructs and geometric patterns. They are both spontaneous and tender, employing a kind of “automatic writing” style that retains its inherent lyricism.