JEAN-FRANÇOIS LAUDA

NEW PAINTINGS

EXHIBITION DATES:
APRIL 30 - JUNE 11, 2022

‘...it is the active doing that demonstrates the meaningfulness, and perhaps the moral necessity, of a specifically abstract practice. This self-understanding in terms of the phenomenology of making is very much what the work is all about.’

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition with Montreal artist Jean-Francois Lauda.

Lauda came from an artistic family and his aspirations for art and music were encouraged and embraced from a very young age. He understood that paintings possessed “a certain aesthetic significance, a certain aesthetic necessity for life” and it is this deep understanding that continues to inform his practice, giving shape, form and sound to his serene paintings.

“With a discerning approach to image as a surface of layers and traces, Lauda’s recent oil on canvas works refuse language and subject in favor of an experimental encounter with the indeterminate.”

Lauda’s paintings invite the viewer to enter an indeterminate place and lean into the freedom of painting - a field that still remains open to any possibility. Through an intuitive approach and a fugitive quality of marks, his work embraces the unexpected and seeks to understand the residual traces of the image. Informed by his talent as a musician (Lauda also makes improvised music), his compositions have a contrapuntal quality about them, revealing a constant desire to balance the elements of chaos with the constraints of order. Paint application shifts from scraping to stamping, from spraying to rubbing, to lightly brushing the paint on the canvas. Large swaths of muted and earthy paint are activated, sometimes unpredictably, by rich exclamatory surges of color. By allowing the provisional and accidental to punctuate the careful precision and thoughtfulness of the underlying structure, Lauda creates expressive compositions in which gesture and geometry are intertwined. The end results are paintings where simplicity and serenity are met with a certain “grunge” component that gives the paintings their inimitable gravitas.

Lauda encourages the viewer to take a nuanced approach to the indeterminate. He does so with remarkable gentleness through an intimate, experiential relationship with time*, gesture, color and space. His exhibition of beautiful paintings allows for the ineffable experience of abstraction at its best.

Jean-François Lauda is a Canadian born artist currently working in Montreal. Lauda has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the United States. Notable solo and two-person exhibitions include; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; Joe Project, Parc Offsite, Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, VIE D’ANGE, Darling Foundry and the Guido Molinari Foundation in Montreal; Angell Gallery, Toronto. Lauda was also part of the group exhibition Du Côté de chez Soon (2018), at Galerie René Blouin, in Montreal. He has been awarded grants from both the Canadian Council for the Arts and Québec Council for the Arts. His works are included extensively in both private and public collections including the National Museum of Fine Arts, Québec and Prêt d’oeuvres d’Art du Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec.

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.