After studying at the Memphis Academy of Art in 1965, then at the Universidad de las Américas de Mexico for two years, Valerie Jaudon took classes with Gillian Ayres* at the St Martins School of Art in London (1968-1969). She later moved to New York. Fascinated by non-Western art, architecture and decoration, she sought out visual forms shared by different cultures, which she used as the basis for her early abstract works. Defending the decorative value of art and opposing masculine pre-eminence in abstraction, she is one of the major figures of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which developed in the United States in the mid-seventies, around painters Richard Kalina (1946), Joyce Kozloff*, Miriam Shapiro (1923), and Robert R. Zakanitch (1935). With no illusion of depth, her paintings are based on a simple decorative structure, the pattern, which develops over a given surface. The repetition of motifs and the juxtaposition of similar abstract elements are echoed symmetrically or intersect over monochrome backgrounds in bright colours, as in the work Pheba (1977). Her painting is characterised by interlacing, created using a palette knife, in a stark style. From this period through to the present day, each series is based on an ornamental style. In the 1980s, her geometric motifs, akin to hieroglyphs, thus stood out against backgrounds that were either monochrome, or made up of polychrome stripes, resulting more recently in paintings composed with a formal vocabulary similar to a language (Alphabet, 2006). Since her first exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York in 1977, the work of Jaudon has been presented on several occasions in the United States and in Europe. Since 1977, she has also worked on public commissions reworking her pictorial principles, such as Long Division (1988) for the metro station on 23rd Street, in New York.
Fanny DRUGEON
See this illustrated text on the website of the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
