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Linked, in the 1970 to the Pattern and Decoration move Valerie Jaudon has more lately 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 of that kind 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 instant that quickly came to be known as "Pattern and Decoration." even now 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 clustered together around the late 1980 and early '90 sometimes in a less degree than the rubric of "Conceptual Abstraction" (the title of a 1991 arrange show Jaudon participated in at the gallery at which she has been describeed since 1983, Sidney Janis).

The "conceptual" tag always looked misleading, in regard to Jaudon as well as to mostly of the others, insofar as their work had nothing to do with the fundamentally linguistic and contextual bases of classic Conceptual art. however it could be loosely justified in names of the rather cool, intellectual approach shared on most of these painters, as well as their taste for combination of parts to form a wholes and seriality such as had been in such a manner essential to many of the original Conceptualists. As Robert C Morgan has pointed on the outside "Jaudon's paintings . . extend the rigorous specifications of LeWitt, Le Va, Bochner and Bartlett (early) in limits of an explicit opticality."(1) This passion for classifications must have made Jaudon something of an uneven woman out among the Patternists who pursu an frequently raucous or whimsical anti-formalism. onward 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 moreover user-friendly public and architectural devises that have occupied Jaudon regularly since 1988

While the dichotomy within the reception of Jaudon's work may attend as a condemnation of journalistic and curatorial trend-mongering, it is equally a tribute to the breadth of implication in a carcass 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 single in kind Jaudon's (or any artist's) work "really" belongs to, yet in order to point without that while Jaudon's artistic progression in a continuously ascending gradation has been entirely consistent for the past 20 years, the couple labels which have most frequently 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 completely explores the Pattern and Decoration connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts for Jaudon's early work, rightly emphasizing the distinctly feminist inflection of the manner of moving Chave also explores the significance for the motion 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 single name that never arises in her account, notwithstanding that it is that of common of Stella's most explicit sources--and also, I would argue, a crucial precursor for Jaudon as well. I am speaking of Jaudon's mate southerner Jasper Johns, who could have been issuing a manifesto for the as-yet unheard-of Pattern and Decoration manner of moving when he declared, in the catalogue for the Museum of novel Art's "Sixteen Americans" exhibition in 1959 "Generally, I am oppos to painting which is belong toed with conceptions of simplicity. Everything direct the eyes very busy to me."

The first hints of Jaudon's obligation to Johns appeared in 1975 when her work narrowed itself down to a nucleus from which everything she has done since has unraveled Not that the break from her previous work, set forthed in the retrospective by sum of two units paintings and three drawings from 1973 was total. The paintings of 1973 were already based in succession the interaction among horizontal, vertical, diagonal and circular geometrical ingredients on a square canvas, which would possess Jaudon through the end of the decade. nevertheless these interactions had not nevertheless resolved themselves into anything like a pattern, remaining tied to a more familiar custom 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 blows of acrylic paint cemented together, as it were, by dint of oddly shaped areas of bare canvas that escape wherever her system of intersecting grids and rings has left an area blank.