Contemporary Painting is overwhelmed by its own self-reflexivity – saturated by its own history of various practices and discourses that developed under the term Modernity. Probably the most significant narratives in the history of painting conceptualized and contextualized themselves as barrelling towards and arriving at some sort of finality inherent to the very trajectory of painting; we reached the end of painting not only with the conclusion of Modernism, but also in the 1960s. Painting then is characterized by practices in which “the end” seems to be serially integrated or infinitely delayed – be it as a melancholic attitude, be it suspended in between objectiveness and a subjective gesture, be it in a self-reflective return towards the historicity of their own process. The works of Sergej Jensen seem to have literally absorbed those narratives. Immediately recognizable as painting, his works depend on their dynamic relationship of both continuity and distance to the tradition of painting. Jensen’s sewn fabric patches evoke an expressiveness, while also withholding and therefore negating the pathetic-subjective painterly act. He facilitates processes rather than playing an active role in their production. In some of Jensen’s works, only the back of canvases are painted –the colours discerned are then diluted and dependent on the environment in which the paintings are seen He uses materials such as bleach, diamond powder, printed line sacs or see-through nettle, which open his paintings to chance, associations and historical references. For Texte zur Kunst, Sergej Jensen has produced a series of fabric paintings – each individually cut and then restitched. The resewn cuts are suggestive of eyes – “one-eyed pictures” – either as a disturbing scar, denying the view, or as a twinkle in one’s eye.