The Brooklyn Rail

A visitor to Valerie Jaudon’s stunning show at DC Moore, made up of sixteen oils produced between 2006 and 2023, might justifiably wonder just what it is she is trying to express. This imaginary visitor might know nothing of her participation in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s or of the fact that she coined the term “conceptual abstraction” to describe her own work and that of others. Familiarity with the details of an artist’s career is not a sine qua non for enjoying art, but it is well to remember that Jaudon’s recent work is the result of well over half a century of artistic production.

We could go even a bit further back in time to fully fathom Jaudon’s art, to Samuel Beckett’s notorious quip in his 1949 dialogue with Georges Duthuit on the artist Tal-Coat: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” Applied to Jaudon’s paintings, Beckett’s sinuously circular statement explains her choice to eschew representation, her implacable fidelity to design, and the impenetrable nature of her art. Surface is all: scrape it away and you reach the linen that grounds the game she plays with and against herself.

Jaudon’s work in this show is of two kinds: paintings that constitute closed systems, where her meandering patterns are locked together, and others that send a tendril outward, as if aspiring to link up with their neighbors. Each is like a puzzle piece, but from myriad puzzles all jumbled together, foreclosing any hope of achieving unity. This is the point, both for Beckett and Jaudon: each painting here constitutes the result of “the obligation to express,” the almost physical need Jaudon has to apply paint to linen in a certain way. But at the same time, each constitutes a statement about the impossibility of transforming that obligation into some coherent totality.

Hence the show’s title: Parameters. Parameters are limits, measurable elements that define a given system. Think of Jaudon’s linen surfaces as parameters within which she must translate her ideas into paint. Her conjoined lines fight themselves, struggle, yet remain encased within the limitations imposed by the medium. This is not deprivation but the freedom that comes from accepting constraints: writing a sonnet means freely submitting to the rules of the form. To work within those restraints is no loss of freedom; rather, it is a challenge to the artist’s virtuosity. And it is that quality which ultimately abounds here.

Portamento (2019), one of the larger works here at 72 by 72 inches, is a striking case in point. Jaudon takes her title, as she often does, from music: “a continuous gliding movement from one tone to another,” either by voice or instrument. But the shapes—curves and straight lines sometimes almost forming triangles—exist in discrete isolation, more a glissando, a choppy rather than flowing continuity. The curved, vaguely biomorphic shapes are not only linked to Jaudon’s sinuous lines but penetrated with an evocative sensuality that stops short of consummation. The incomplete triangles create thwarted axes so that try as we might to organize the work into a coherent totality, we fail. The painting’s true mystery lies in the lines on all four sides that seek to exit the surface, once again frustrating any aspiration to a great totality.

Segno (2021), at 48 by 48 inches, states Jaudon’s case in black and white. Segno or dal segno is another musical term, an annotation that tells a musician to repeat a given passage. The bold, assertive black angles and curves that fill the canvas to the brim echo one another without necessarily being identical. Here the allusion to that frustrated totality is pronounced: the black squiggles accept the limitations of the canvas under protest, the phallic arrow shapes that reappear throughout retain their power but never succumb to expressionistic passion.

Jaudon’s show at DC Moore is a superb exhibition, filled with works that build upon the artist’s impressive career. Here Jaudon shows us the fruits of a long-term commitment to setting and maintaining one’s own artistic parameters.