Valerie Jaudon at Von Lintel

Art in America, Oct, 2005 by Lilly Wei

What is the function of painting, and can it still exist solely as an object of contemplation and enjoyment, just to please the eye, without narrative, without ideology, without movable parts? There are those who believe with passionate conviction that it can, and there are those who have other ideas about what painting is and should be. Valerie Jaudon, long associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement and one of its notable practitioners, has always made a compelling argument for a certain kind of visual pleasure--cool, ordered but intense, sometimes opulent, sometimes severe, with a slightly dissonant edge. Her latest seven paintings--clearly and brightly colored, their repeating geometries deconstructed and filigreed--are no exceptions to this stance.

Abstractions, these works nonetheless have their referential aspects and recall motifs drawn from folk and traditional image vocabularies, such as a stylized tree of life, a flowering plant or even the schematized masks emblazoned on ancient Chinese bronzes. On the other hand, these calligraphic swirls resemble less the cast-iron grilles and other architectural ornamentation that Jaudon's patterns have often been compared to in the past. Staccato, more flexible than before, these hard-edged, disrupted sequences--the broken, curved and pointed sections--look delicate, accompanied by thin, whiplashed lines. The reading of the painting is controlled, held back, balked, as the eye scans the gap between traceries, the small negative spaces that become positive for a moment and shift the emphasis. Pausing a moment, the gaze then jumps over, moves on to the next cut in a slowed progression.

Jaudon's preference for bilateral symmetry, divided by implied or actual vertical lines, is intact but more aerated, with a greater distinction between figure and ground, which, here, is a satiny quilt of high-gloss, cross-hatched brushstrokes. Yellow is present in every painting in a variety of shades, except for one canvas of gray, white and black. The yellow is paired in each case with another primary--or versions of it--such as a robin's egg blue in True to Life or a brilliant, beautiful cinnabar red in Heart of the Matter. The sinuous lines that act as a scaffold, echoing the rhythms of the color bands, are always black, lending definition to the composition, with color and line in vibrant lockstep. As Jaudon continues to mine her chosen territory for new resolutions, new riches, this is one form of intelligent design that can be believed in.