“I use multiplication, addition and subtraction in painting a picture. I use this method because the square gives me the means of setting boundaries. I find in the square specific settings, divisible areas, number structures, possibilities of time measure and rhythm as well as the essential form of color which can be placed in the square to interplay with number forms. My daughter Anna said, ‘You make different things the same.’” - Alfred Jensen, quoted in Alfred Jensen (Buffalo: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1978).

In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, Marcia Tucker describes Jensen’s work as ‘flat, thickly painted checkerboards of bright color, numbered or bordered with obscure scientific symbols or equations, bands of lush, heavy color, geometries and patterns that are somehow familiar, classical,’ calling to mind ‘Persian rugs, gameboards, tiled floors, Tantric diagrams, illuminated manuscripts and medieval stained-glass windows.’

Jensen is quoted in Linda Cathcart’s essay for the exhibition catalogue, “specialization ends in self-destruction, so my mission as an artist is to put that over, I respond to the sensibility of my epoch. The artist is the predecessor to actual events and discoveries. I don’t want results, I want the road.”