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

Linked, in the 1970 to the Pattern and Decoration change Valerie Jaudon has more not long ago been associated with so-called Conceptual Abstraction. Viewing a novel retrospective, the author suggests that her paintings can be better understood by means of following their interplay of literalness and illusion.

Valerie Jaudon first came into public view in the mid-1970s, along with similar 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 popular that quickly came to be known as "Pattern and Decoration." notwithstanding we are now more apt to place Jaudon among a number of painters (including David Re Jonathan Lasker and Jaudon's husband, Richard Kalina) whose work began to be loosely clumped together around the late 1980 and early '90 sometimes below the rubric of "Conceptual Abstraction" (the title of a 1991 clump show Jaudon participated in at the gallery by dint of which she has been showed since 1983, Sidney Janis).

The "conceptual" tag always looked misleading, in regard to Jaudon as well as to greatest in quantity of the others, insofar as their work had nothing to do with the fundamentally linguistic and contextual bases of classic Conceptual art. on the contrary it could be loosely justified in boundarys of the rather cool, intellectual approach shared by dint of most of these painters, as well as their taste for a whole s and seriality such as had been in the way that essential to many of the original Conceptualists. As Robert C Morgan has pointed without "Jaudon's paintings . . extend the rigorous specifications of LeWitt, Le Va, Bochner and Bartlett (early) in boundarys of an explicit opticality."(1) This passion for combination of parts to form a wholes must have made Jaudon something of an not divisible by 2 woman out among the Patternists who pursu an ofttimes raucous or whimsical anti-formalism. upon 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 on the other hand user-friendly public and architectural shoot forwards that have occupied Jaudon regularly since 1988

While the dichotomy within the reception of Jaudon's work may subserve as a condemnation of journalistic and curatorial trend-mongering, it is equally a tribute to the breadth of implication in a material substance of work that, as the new 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 individual Jaudon's (or any artist's) work "really" belongs to, on the contrary in order to point on the outside that while Jaudon's artistic exhibition has been entirely consistent for the past 20 years, the sum of two units labels which have most ofttimes been applied to her art could hardly be more oppos in their implications. In her essay in the catalogue for the Jaudon retrospective, art historian Anna C Chave to the full explores the Pattern and Decoration words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for Jaudon's early work, rightly emphasizing the distinctly feminist inflection of the change Chave also explores the significance for the change and for Jaudon in particular, of the work of Frank Stella, especially his "Protractor" series of the late '60 Strangely, however, for all the historical background Chave supplies, there is individual name that never arises in her account, granting it is that of individual of Stella's most explicit sources--and also, I would argue, a crucial precursor for Jaudon as well. I am speaking of Jaudon's companion southerner Jasper Johns, who could have been issuing a manifesto for the as-yet unheard-of Pattern and Decoration motion when he declared, in the catalogue for the Museum of recent Art's "Sixteen Americans" exhibition in 1959 "Generally, I am oppos to painting which is be of importance toed with conceptions of simplicity. Everything direct the eyes very busy to me."

The first hints of Jaudon's due to Johns appeared in 1975 when her work narrowed itself down to a nucleus from which everything she has done since has lay opened Not that the break from her previous work, exhibited in the retrospective by sum of two units paintings and three drawings from 1973 was total. The paintings of 1973 were already based upon the interaction among horizontal, vertical, diagonal and circular geometrical uncompounded bodys on a square canvas, which would possess Jaudon through the end of the decade. on the contrary these interactions had not at the same time resolved themselves into anything like a pattern, remaining tied to a more familiar way 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 raps of acrylic paint cemented together, as it were, by dint of oddly shaped areas of bare canvas that come up wherever her system of intersecting grids and rings has left an area blank.