Valerie Jaudon
“Parameters”
New York, 535 West 22nd Street
In 2006, Valerie Jaudon’s practice underwent a fundamental shift when the artist eschewed color and optical elements for compositions of white paint on bare linen canvas. Her most recent paintings maintain the simplified palette of white and black paint on raw canvas, while introducing freely curving lines, creating irregular forms within the complex architecture of the composition. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, featuring an essay by Pepe Karmel, “Valerie Jaudon: Symmetry and Its Discontents.”
Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery
In Jaudon’s newest paintings, a complex balance emerges between a symmetrical wholeness and deliberate irregularities, which Karmel describes as a “regenerative experience of disruption and restoration.” Using building blocks of straight lines and curves, the artist puts into play an endlessly open-ended visual system. Calling to mind diverse references such as musical scores, cartography, Islamic and Romanesque architecture, and mathematical fractals, these abstract forms comprise a unique alphabet drawn from naturally occurring patterns, geometrical constructs, and art historical signifiers.
Several of the new works feature unmodeled, yet almost sculptural, shapes filling in the configuration of line work, with blank canvas creating space around these enclosures. Jaudon inverts her patterns to generate new forms, exploring the full possibilities of space created by the linear motifs. The linear composition of Aria becomes the template for the planar forms of Consort (both 2022), with convex and comma-like shapes created by altering the relationships of positive and negative space. The precisionist rigor of these paintings is balanced by a lively painted surface and a feeling of spontaneity -- the grid providing a ground for improvisation rather than constriction.
