Jean-François Lauda at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present Some exceeding twelve minutes, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jean-François Lauda.

“Maybe what I’m most interested in, anyway, is time; how in painting, time merges with materials to form constant changes,” writes Amy Sillman in her essay “On Color.”[1] Really giving one’s attention to something requires slowness. Lauda describes his process as being “shaped by attention.” By “staying with something long enough to understand what it’s doing, or undoing.” One could also describe this as the viewer’s experience: a slowed down looking, an attention that passes from the artist to the painting to whatever audience it finds.

The title “Some exceeding twelve minutes,” a phrase which Lauda found in a text referring to the track lengths of a certain musician, refers to a stretching out, or an excess of time. While “twelve minutes” still provides a structure or parameter to that stretchiness. These relationships between control and chaos, speed and slowness, are all present in Lauda’s work. With a background in music himself, Lauda often uses temporal language when describing his paintings: rhythm, fast, slow, duration, delay.

Built up in thin layers that appear more like watercolour or chalk than paint, there’s no concealing of one step to the next, but rather an articulated building. Sometimes pencil marks are visible. Traces of quick decisions appear beside the weight of something revised again and again. Some marks arrive suddenly, others accumulate more slowly. Their differences aren’t resolved; they’re left to coexist, to complicate each other. The paintings’ surfaces are often very dry, almost parched, making the appearance of one, wet, sumptuous mark, a glimmering surprise.

Lauda often leaves small, almost indiscernible borders around the edge of his canvases. This prohibits any illusion of the painting stretching beyond its confines. There is no horizon that one could imagine extending beyond the frame; there is only what exists here and now. Similarly, any references to the world outside the canvas dissolve upon closer inspection. One has to contend with the marks that are in front of them. “Painting, for me, is a way to stay close to uncertainty—to let intuition speak before understanding sets in” writes Lauda. Oftentimes the canvases are further divided into two or more distinct, though related rectangular spaces. This also complicates how the eye travels, as it can’t lazily drift across the canvas. Instead, there are stops, starts, and returns, just like the parts of a score, or a piece of music. These structures keep the time, but within that tempo, there is instability, searching, complexity. “What matters is that the work stays open—to change, to doubt, to the shifting nature of perception. It doesn’t insist. It waits.”

Solo exhibitions by Jean-François Lauda include Big Pill at Galerie Eli Kerr in Montreal (2024); The Silver Cord at Fonderie Darling in Montreal (2018); Joueurs, a two-person show with Serge Murphy at the Guido Molinari Foundation in Montreal (2018); and an upcoming show at Gisela Capitain in Cologne, Germany (2025). Lauda’s works are held in important collections, including those of Hydro-Québec, National Bank of Canada, National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, and TD Bank, among others.

[1] Sillman, Amy, “On Color,” Amy Sillman: Faux Pas. Selected Writings and Drawings, Paris: After 8 Books, 2022.