Fleeing Father Time
Field Notes from Jean-François Lauda's current exhibition, Some exceeding 12 minutes.
Jean-François Lauda [link]
Some exceeding twelve minutes
Daniel Faria Gallery [link]
19 June - 26 July, 2025
images courtesy of the gallery
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To the readers who’ve endured my tardiness over the years, who are sharpening their knives to the title of this letter: sup 😈😈😈
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This has been my summer of love editing. I’m going through stories with a magnifying glass, wearily pressing delete, tripling and quadrupling the lengths of paragraphs that feel wrong so they can be trimmed back down into something right. This is meant to happen in the first 60 minutes of my day, before moving on to the work that pays me1. I turn to the clock after two paragraphs to realize that 90 or 120 minutes have already gone.
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It’s a vulnerable step in art-making to accept that the piece you spent 50+ hours on might be consumed for no more than 5 minutes (if you’re lucky), more likely rejected after a glance. But how lucky we are to find work that justifies this calculation, stripping away the preciousness of time. I’ve come to embrace the feeling of blowing hours away like the floaties of a dandelion, knowing most of them will end up in the gutter.
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Contrary to popular belief, I am always trying to take time that is not mine seriously. When viewing art, I remind myself that the artist donated hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours to spawn this seed which landed in front of me. It doesn’t have to take root, but maybe it deserves another minute of my attention. Maybe it deserves more than a rating out of 10. I try; I often fail.
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Perhaps the best compliment I can give to Jean-François Lauda’s show is that I allotted a generous window of time to see it and still arrived 20 minutes late to my next appointment, which was down the street.
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Some exceeding twelve minutes, Lauda’s exhibition title, was taken from a text about a musician, referring to the lengths of their songs. This detail speaks volumes; a 12+ minute song is a non-starter for the average music listener. To many, it implies a specific genre. It also imparts a certain seriousness in the work—some might call it a pretension. The type of music that refuses to fade into the background. I can order a chatbot to fill my next 230 seconds with chillwave; how dare an artist stipulate such demanding terms of engagement with their work?
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Lauda does not seem concerned, as I am, about how much time viewers will honour the work with. His paintings feel more like an expression of time itself, how it contracts and dilates, how it feels to be lost in time while working on something that negates it. They peek inside a place—a studio, a word document, a memory—where time feels as malleable as colour, sentence, mood. You recognize the place and long to go there.
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I often listen to post-rock/noise during editing—Godspeed You! Black Emperor, as of late—as a reminder of just how coherent nonverbal expression can be. It’s the same inspiration that propels non-narrative texts, abstract paintings. Would I know, without their song and album titles, that Godspeed’s music is political? Would I know, without the exhibition text and title, that Lauda’s work muses on time? Perhaps not, but the importance of these works is their ability to suspend me in a place of not-knowing. When executed well, the work invites you to the very same timeless, structureless place that summoned it from the artist. Abstraction allows me to make room for incoherence in my own work, and life.
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I would like to conduct a test. It will require ~1,000 participants. Each will pass through three rounds. In Round A, the participant will be dropped into a house party full of beautiful, interesting people, but they are cornered by a man who talks about his stock portfolio for 22 minutes and 32 seconds. In Round B, the participant will be placed on a comfortable couch in an empty white room with a Hi-Fi sound system which plays the iconic 22 minute and 32 second Storm by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In Round C, they will be placed on an empty road in a vast, prairie landscape to stroll and let their minds wander for 22 minutes and 32 seconds. They will not be informed about the quantity of time that passed in each round; they will be asked to guess.
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Why? Because my guesses would be terrible, and I think the spread of estimates across the three rounds would be fascinating. It’s also revealing of the experiences that make time disappear and those which make it close in from all directions. I suspect that the estimates from perpetually late people would show the most variance. These folks tend not to be selfish with their time, as they are so often perceived; they are sensitive to things that make it malleable. There is a frequency which keeps summoning them away from its monotonous drone. And while their friends, doctors, colleagues might hate them for it, they should heed the call.
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