LOCUS : Johnny Jensen

August Strindberg laid plates coated with photo emulsion out into the night to capture imprints of the starry sky, unmediated by the distortions of lenses. Johnny Jensen, too, is concerned with cosmic imprints, but in series such as Land and Locus he deliberately adds a layer of noise. 

Locus inhabits that register where deep tones muddle and colors fade. Where details dissolve, and where we encounter darkness on a bright summer's day-not through eclipse or volcanic ash, but through a calling. For it is neither the sun's nor the starlight's imprint on photosensitive material that concerns him, but rather the response to that call. 

Locus denotes, after all, a place of occurrence-but what, and where? Perhaps right here, as you are reading. Or walking with Johnny Jensen through depopulated places. 

One might fleetingly glimpse oneself in a passing reflection, but the artist prepares the 

receptive viewer for a deeper resonance, one he himself has sensed in places like these. Not in the hum of others or of mobile phones, but in something else that stirs after a pause, trickling or surging out of the shadows. 

"Yes, there is in fact water in all twenty works of the exhibition," he nods during our conversation. Sixteen smaller squares unfold across four larger pieces. Jung might have spoken of the collective unconscious, of archetypal patterns and interpretations linked to the life-giving, light-bearing element of water, here enveloped by darkness. We might call it God, though there is no Trinity or symbolism at play-only channels of spiritual flow, carried by the few photons that make possible an artistic reconciliation with the loss of darkness's innocence. 

Here you will find neither storm-tossed seas nor still lakes framed by forests or mountains at dusk, as in J.C. Dahl, Ruisdael, or the old Dutch masters. Water may indeed surge like in North Atlantic postcards, or trickle gently in modest ponds and leafy woodland idylls- but Locus offers neither glitter nor saturated hues to overwhelm the senses. Instead, it presents something that unsettles, something to be sensed and embraced. Glimpses of recognition rather than glimmers on water. All the more space, then, to move slowly through the images, where murky layers and details may gradually emerge-like in 

Antonioni's Blowup-and where Locus calls not for elucidation, but for clarity of another kind. 

-Henning Wettendorff