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Out of "Wack"

I hardly expected to see Valerie Jaudon in a show of feminist art, but I left “WACK!” half-wondering where she had been. She, too, came of age in the 1970s-with a style, quickly dubbed pattern and decoration, that P.S. 1 considers very much a part of its “feminist revolution.” At Von Lintel through this weekend, one can see why Jaudon may not easily conform to anyone’s idea of woman’s work, not even that of its champions.

For Joyce Kozloff, Joan Snyder, or Miriam Schapiro, “mere decoration” could borrow the materials of fashion or craft, offer a lyrical update of folk art, or explode into images from nature. Jaudon works in oil, prefers control to lyricism, and explodes only in the prepared mind. Like her last show, her new work sticks to her favorite color, white, and to geometric abstraction. It looks even more impersonal-or just plain boring-in reproduction, where one cannot experience the scale, the brushwork, or especially all the bare linen. She might even do the rigor of her male predecessors one better. Where Sol LeWitt begins with a set of rules and ends with something unruly, Jaudon starts with marks that may run every which way and none, only to end with a grid.

Both involve a process of scaling up. Jaudon appears to use a fairly wide, loaded brush or a palette knife. The individual marks add up to well-defined lines or curves, perhaps twice again as wide. They could pass for doodles, except that they run only horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. They also have absolutely hard, unpainted edges, like a mitred maze by Frank Stella. The doodles in turn divide the canvas into nine equal square sectors, like a tic-tac-toe board, but never quite interrupting her characteristic byzantine patterning.

One can hardly miss the grid, even in a thumbnail, but one has a hard time pinning it down up close. The doodles may stop abruptly after a few inches or wander across the grid, with or without a break. (That with or without is consistent within a painting.) At other times they abruptly change direction at a break as if in a mirror-or a Crosshatch painting by Jasper Johns. Johns called one of his first in the series Weeping Women, and he painted it in 1975, just two years before Jaudon had her first solo show, but she does not share the anxiety of his broken symmetries.

She could seem to have reversed course, as a strategic retreat after several years of more obvious patterns in color. She could also seem to have ditched the very Islamic or Gothic echoes that made her famous, in favor of something more conceptual and respectable. However, just when so many, including feminists, are complicating the story of painting after the death of painting, so is she. She does it by reasserting continuities, but also by an insistent sensuality. In person the three-by-three grid weaves in and out of consciousness like Op Art or like color for Ad Reinhardt. Besides, all that exposed fabric has a sensual weave of its own, not unlike fashion or craft.

Out in Brooklyn, Rita MacDonald revels in both Op Art and domestic fabrics. Tic may sound as if bereft of its tac and toe, but it covers one wall of Smack Mellon, through April 20, with twenty-four foot verticals of black and white house paint. (Nearby Amanda Mathis assembles the materials of a gallery renovation into a heavily skewed white pyramid, while Jennifer Dalton uses the back room for clever pretend social science about the politics of nonprofit gallery-goers.) The bands alone, one thick stripe flanked by two thin ones, get the optical activity going. Just in case one missed the resemblance to wrapping paper or a tablecloth, they also veer into the illusion of gigantic folds around eye level. Jaudon or, for that matter, the Op Art of Bridget Riley can flounder in reproduction, but even online the Brooklyn gallery wall more than trembles-and maybe it is about time a gallery did.

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