In his paintings, Wolf uses the visual language of geometric abstraction in all its forms. We recognise the visual syntax of Frank Stella in the Fifties, and the typeface used by heavy metal bands on LP covers in the Seventies. Jens Wolf paints on simple sheets of multiplex that emphasise the geometric shapes and also form an important element of the work. This can be seen in certain works where the edges break off, and Wolf plays with the wood’s absorbency. The painted shapes are always incomplete; visible pencil lines reveal an overview from the draft stage to the final result, with which the production process is transparent and visible.
By their form, the paintings of Jens Wolf refer to the pure painting of the ‘Hard Edge’ and ‘Concrete Painting’ styles. Geometric shapes and concentric circles comprise the visual language. A language loaded with history and that directly recalls artists such as Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and Jozef Alberts.
Where these painters were concerned with reaching a utopia of pure painting, Jens Wolf lends this abstraction a contemporary meaning. The raw, sometimes damaged wood upon which he works, the deliberately imperfect geometric shapes and the splotches that crop up during the working process refer to graffiti and to the dynamic of the city and all its visual stimuli. In the work of Jens Wolf, the icons of formal abstract painting are liberated from their Modernist straitjacket. Wolf integrates them as signs of the everyday grammar of shape of the urban context, somewhere between culture and subculture.