Valerie Jaudon | Ways and Means

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Valerie Jaudon. The exhibition marks the artist’s sixth with the gallery.

Valerie Jaudon’s captivating maze-like paintings are meditations on line, rhythm, duration and structure. Sharp turns, rounded corners and long-running straightaways bypass and interlace across raw linen or impastoed monochrome fields. The articulated forms wind into modules, first drafted as large drawings on paper and then pencil transferred onto either canvas or linen. The modules reverse, replicate and transpose until the entire surface is covered and a path is carved and paved with lush brushstrokes of paint.

The repeating patterns translate into a lexicon that conjures historical art movements: the edges of Geometric Abstraction, the reduced color of Minimalism and the modularity of Systems Art—and literal alphabets.
A visceral musicality courses through each piece as underscored by form: each point of contact is bordered by a slight reveal of raw linen support for a moment of pause or accent of clarity. And title: Nonet refers to a composition for nine voices or instruments; the namesake painting features the same number of interwoven systems. Or Stretto: the final section of a fugue (originated in the 16th century) when one voice counterpoints another to increase textural intensity. The correlating painting contains two independent, overlapping schematics with contours reminiscent of ornate architecture or ancient calligraphy.

As an artist closely associated with the 1970s Pattern & Decoration movement, Jaudon’s work investigates and experiments outside the boundaries of what was a narrowly mainstream, modernist box.

“Complex in plan, elegant in realization, these paintings relate as clearly to the work of canonical artists like Jasper Johns and Frank Stella as they do to Islamic screens and grilles. Once subversive, they now seem surprisingly classic.”
—-David Frankel, Artforum

Jaudon is included in the collections of over thirty institutions, among them: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; National Gallery, Washington DC; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaeck, Denmark; Suermondt-Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Germany. The artist lives and works in New York.

For additional information or visual material, please contact the gallery at (310) 559-5700 or by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.