Degrees of symmetry - painting, Valerie Jaudon, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Barry Schwabsky

Linked, in the 1970s, to the Pattern and Decoration movement, Valerie Jaudon has more recently been associated with so-called Conceptual Abstraction. Viewing a recent retrospective, the author suggests that her paintings can be better understood by following their interplay of literalness and illusion.

Valerie Jaudon first came into public view in the mid-1970s, along with such artists as Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, Robert Zakanitch and Robert Kushner (many of whom, like Jaudon at the time, were exhibiting with the Holly Solomon Gallery), as part of the artistic current that quickly came to be known as "Pattern and Decoration." Yet we are now more apt to place Jaudon among a number of painters (including David Reed, Jonathan Lasker and Jaudon's husband, Richard Kalina) whose work began to be loosely grouped together around the late 1980s and early '90s, sometimes under the rubric of "Conceptual Abstraction" (the title of a 1991 group show Jaudon participated in at the gallery by which she has been represented since 1983, Sidney Janis).

The "conceptual" tag always seemed misleading, in regard to Jaudon as well as to most of the others, insofar as their work had nothing to do with the fundamentally linguistic and contextual bases of classic Conceptual art. But it could be loosely justified in terms of the rather cool, intellectual approach shared by most of these painters, as well as their taste for systems and seriality such as had been so essential to many of the original Conceptualists. As Robert C. Morgan has pointed out, "Jaudon's paintings . . . extend the rigorous specifications of LeWitt, Le Va, Bochner, and Bartlett (early) in terms of an explicit opticality."(1) This passion for systems must have made Jaudon something of an odd woman out among the Patternists who pursued an often raucous or whimsical anti-formalism. On the other hand, the Pattern and Decoration movement's interest in the applied arts--often in an explicit challenge to high-art taboos against functionality--seems relevant to the relatively restrained but user-friendly public and architectural projects that have occupied Jaudon regularly since 1988.

While the dichotomy within the reception of Jaudon's work may serve as a condemnation of journalistic and curatorial trend-mongering, it is equally a tribute to the breadth of implication in a body of work that, as the recent retrospective at the Mississippi Museum of Art (Jaudon is a Mississippi native) reminds us, has nonetheless always been as rigorously focused as it has been beautiful.

I bring up this question of categories not because I think it important to determine which one Jaudon's (or any artist's) work "really" belongs to, but in order to point out that while Jaudon's artistic development has been entirely consistent for the past 20 years, the two labels which have most often been applied to her art could hardly be more opposed in their implications. In her essay in the catalogue for the Jaudon retrospective, art historian Anna C. Chave fully explores the Pattern and Decoration context for Jaudon's early work, rightly emphasizing the distinctly feminist inflection of the movement. Chave also explores the significance for the movement, and for Jaudon in particular, of the work of Frank Stella, especially his "Protractor" series of the late '60s. Strangely, however, for all the historical background Chave supplies, there is one name that never arises in her account, though it is that of one of Stella's most explicit sources--and also, I would argue, a crucial precursor for Jaudon as well. I am speaking of Jaudon's fellow southerner Jasper Johns, who could have been issuing a manifesto for the as-yet unheard-of Pattern and Decoration movement when he declared, in the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art's "Sixteen Americans" exhibition in 1959, "Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks very busy to me."

The first hints of Jaudon's debt to Johns appeared in 1975 when her work narrowed itself down to a nucleus from which everything she has done since has developed. Not that the break from her previous work, represented in the retrospective by two paintings and three drawings from 1973, was total. The paintings of 1973 were already based on the interaction among horizontal, vertical, diagonal and circular geometrical elements on a square canvas, which would occupy Jaudon through the end of the decade. But these interactions had not yet resolved themselves into anything like a pattern, remaining tied to a more familiar mode of geometrical abstraction, though of a complicated and highly exuberant ant kind. In paintings like Toomsuba and Bay St. Louis (all of Jaudon's paintings until 1985 are named after towns in Mississippi), a multiplicity of colors are applied in fat, blocklike strokes of acrylic paint cemented together, as it were, by oddly shaped areas of bare canvas that emerge wherever her system of intersecting grids and rings has left an area blank.