In an age of wildly disparate artistic orientations, it tends to be mavericks rather than team players who make sense of opposing artistic paradigms. Alfred Jensen (1903–1981) was one such figure. Although he had close friendships with Abstract Expressionist painters of his generation, especially Mark Rothko, his work is remote in many ways from their sensibility. It sometimes has the scale, painterly surface treatment and “all-overness” associated with the classic first generation of that movement. But its hermetic preoccupation with number systems, use of universally accessible math signage, and painstaking craft relate to very different ways of making art.

PaceWildenstein has filled the largest of its three New York venues, on West 22nd Street, with mature works mostly from the artist’s last decade.Typically, the paintings are like gargantuan quilts.The surfaces have a simple, satisfying painterliness (their impasto akin to Clyfford Still’s), that arises from painting grounds in one color surrounding numbers or signs in another. “Twelve Events in a Dual Universe” (1978), at 9 feet by 24 feet, consists of two rows of six gridded canvases, hung with one another to form a single mural.

An early work in this show, “Square Beginning — Cyclic Ending, Per I-V” (1960) horizontally stacks five 50-inch-by-50-inch canvases. The work follows a Chinese system in which all the columns of numbers add up to the same total, 15, on the diagonal as well as vertical and horizontal axes. The image progresses from grids with circles drawn over them, in the first three panels, to circles with cubes contained within, in the last two. It has been suggested that this is a reference to Chinese cosmography that describes the earth as square and heaven as round.

Such arcane references combine with the bright color and the obsessively neat, copperplate yet personal handwriting to give the work the sensation of “outsider” art. It’s as if it is the compulsive output of someone slightly touched. But it also relates Jensen to art that came out of, and after, Abstract Expressionism: The hand lettering and design sensibility compare with Jasper Johns, and his stencilled letters, love of systems and number sequences, and reference to popular printed materials and commercial wares. Jensen’s high chroma and cheerful palette also brings an earlier artist, Stuart Davis, to mind, while the hermetic subject matter recalls Dada, which in turn influenced Mr. Johns. Davis, Jensen, and Mr. Johns all celebrate a pop-folkloristic strand of Americana in their work.

Besides bridging Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Jensen’s addiction to the grid also relates him to two other dominant movements that emerged in the 1960s, Minimal Art and Conceptualism. Donald Judd was a vociferous champion of his work, prizing their emphatic flatness and specific, radically abstract color.He insisted that while the challenging math was important to Jensen they were irrelevant to an appreciation of his results. In contrast to this purist or formalist sensibility, as William Agee points out in the catalog, Jensen could also arouse passionate support from a totally different artist like Allan Kaprow, the pioneer of installation art and happenings. For Kaprow it was the “cosmic” vision implied by Jensen’s numerology, not his neat, orderly systembuilding, that constituted the appeal.

Judd’s formalism is very conducive to a viewer like myself who is left befuddled by Jensen’s complex math. There seems, however, to be a vital difference between Jensen’s play with numbers and that of either minimal art or a contemporary, postmodern artist like Matthew Ritchie, whose show at Andrea Rosen I reviewed last week.Ritchie invokes atomic physics with other, equally impressive — and for most of us, impenetrable — codes and systems in work that is slick and sumptuous. The minimalists used deliberately elementary math precisely because they were interested in reduction: Sol LeWitt spoke of art that was “dumb enough to be smart.” It seems that Jensen’s intention is neither to intrigue nor to befuddle, but in a rather grand, modernist, utopian way, to convey the intrinsic beauty of number and painting alike.

***

For all the historic sense he makes of different strands of American art, Jensen also looks very contemporary, with his aesthetic of conceptual overload, nutty craft, arresting decorativeness, and knowing fusion of different art languages.

Besides Mr. Ritchie, there are many contemporary artists who relate to Jensen’s aesthetic. James Siena, for instance, whose algorithmic patterns are eclectically anthropological, and who also shows at PaceWildenstein, is an avid collector of Jensen’s work. While Fred Tomaselli’s art is not ostensibly informed by mathematics, he shares with Mr. Siena a psychedelic, obsessive-compulsive imagery and facture.

Mr. Tomaselli is a latter-day Arcimboldo.Where the renaissance maverick, beloved of the Surrealists, was a protocollagist, painting a market gardener out of artfully combined produce, Mr. Tomaselli prefers to build up a form from a mass of collaged representations of that form. “Avian Flower Serpent” (2006), for instance, is a mammoth presence — thanks both to its small subject, a bird on a tree, and its fastidious mode of execution — at 7 feet by 6 feet. It presents the bird both in acrylic paint outline and through an accumulation of hundreds of tiny fragments of bird photographs. These collage fragments remain legible while also building up to form texture. There are massed beaks around the bigger bird’s beak, eyes around the eye, and so on. In a trippy kind of way, this manages to exude a sense of cosmic interrelationship between the micro and the macro, while also hinting at DNA and reincarnation.

Mr. Tomaselli physically layers his collage elements in a thick wedge of resin, giving the objects a weird sense of being both present and remote, live and preserved. The narcotic nature and origin of his fantasies are literalized by the presence of pills or cannabis leaves, used to exquisite decorative effect in “Hang Over” (2005), a work on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Its title is an obvious pun, but it is a gorgeous work nonetheless. Often in these works, collage elements are deep within the resin, while painted elements are applied on top, in acrylic. The artist presents a conundrum of sorts about representation, thanks to a wry mix of the actual and the depicted.

Jensen until October 28 (545 W.22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-989-4258);

Tomaselli until November 11 (533 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-714-9500).