The Christopher Cutts Gallery is excited to announce our upcoming exhibition, John Abrams’s The first four minutes.

This exhibition presents a new body of work by the Toronto-based painter, based on the opening sequence of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film À bout de souffle (Breathless). The series focuses exclusively on the film’s first four minutes, featuring more than sixty small-scale oil paintings, three large canvases, and a video work.

In The first four minutes, Abrams fragments the iconic French film into an array of extracted images. The artist’s painterly touch distills scenes charged with anticipation and narrative momentum into singular, elegant compositions, suspending fleeting moments between action and reaction. Each painting is a meditation on narrative, atmosphere, and gesture, exploring the latent tension contained within a single film still.

“I have been painting images inspired by cinema for about three decades, frequently returning to the works of Jean-Luc Godard, to the point where my practice could be considered obsessive.

My newest work explores the first four minutes of the 1960 film originally titled “À bout de souffle” (literally meaning ‘without breath’), which introduces viewers to the hero/anti-hero Michel Poiccard, played by French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.

The character, Poiccard, with the help of an unnamed female accomplice, steals a car from an unsuspecting couple, hot-wires it, and speeds away, only to be pursued by motorcycle cops along the road from Marseille to Paris. During his close encounter with law enforcement, Michel discovers a gun hidden in the glove compartment of the stolen vehicle. He uses this gun to shoot and kill one of the pursuing officers before narrowly escaping.

A significant part of the opening narrative centers on a modern young woman who scouts the car for Michel to steal. Though her appearance is brief, it drives the story’s progression. Despite not receiving credit in the film, the unnamed actress delivers a captivating performance, as the film relies on her agency to propel the narrative forward.

I had meant to paint five or six small paintings … I confess to having gotten carried away, as the project took on a life of its own.”

(Excerpt from John Abrams’s artist statement on “The first four minutes”)