JULES DE BALINCOURT

De Balincourt is known for his vibrant compositions imbued with mystery, ambiguity, and psychological import. Taking a singularly expressive approach to making, de Balincourt discovers his paintings as he paints them. In a process akin to abstraction, de Balincourt’s paintings begin with pure form, gradually unfolding a unique mode of figuration. He eschews preparatory sketches in favour of an imaginative process guided by his own stream of consciousness. Despite their formal idiosyncrasies, his boldly and brightly hued works share a lyrical, oneiric quality that defies easy categorisation—painting is let loose in service of discovering the medium’s pleasures and possibilities.

The artist’s work often examines the discordant and harmonious dynamics at play in the relationship between humanity and the natural world. In de Balincourt’s hands, individual marks seem to dissolve and give way to layered effects and formal disturbances, which keep the eye in a state of constant motion. Figures are dissolved and disaggregated to the point of abstraction, coaxing bodies into landscapes and landscapes into bodies.

The surface of his work is almost always wood panel, a support that harkens back to the history of the medium in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and, in his intuitive approach to colour, de Balincourt draws on Fauvist and Expressionist predecessors. Yet the scenes he paints are unmistakably contemporary: artifacts that speak to the ways that the subconscious can reflect the social, political, and cultural conditions of an increasingly anxious and restless world, shaped by the forces of globalisation and technology.

A sense of the nomadic and itinerant pervades de Balincourt’s paintings. Figures seem suspended in the process of movement or displacement. A prevailing ambiguity underlies these moments of transit: are de Balincourt’s figures in motion out of leisure or out of desperation? Are they partaking in a bucolic stroll or a long march, as if escaping from some unseen threat?

The themes of alienation, migration, and ambiguity, which cut through the works that will feature in de Balincourt’s exhibition at Pace, are also echoed in the organisation of the exhibition itself. Paintings of varying in sizes are placed in juxtaposition, creating spatial relationships that convey a sense of rhythmic interaction. The resulting installation plays a key role, inflecting viewers’ interpretations of each composition.

De Balincourt’s mirage-like scenes and imagined dreamscapes are populated by mysterious personages and uncanny figurations. Spectral bodies and silhouettes dance throughout these unknown realms steeped in radiant colour, where movement and form are liberated from ideology.

While de Balincourt uses symbols and metaphors to describe the social and political circumstances in which he works, no single narrative underpins his paintings. Instead, the artist invites contemplation and interpretation, moving freely between varied subject matter and juxtaposing seemingly discordant themes. Often, references to contemporary life contrast with dreamlike scenes, as in the motif of fantasy castle colliding with images of the here-and-now, testifying to the flexible powers of painting as a mode of imaginative inquiry.

In many of de Balincourt’s paintings, a sinister undertone pervades otherwise utopian settings. A nocturnal scene of a campsite nestled in a windswept forest reverberates with both yearning and foreboding, and, in another work, a unknown figures congregate according to strange logics in a bacchanalian gathering, conveying both threat and intrigue. Cutting across his work is a deep sensitivity to both the nuances of the human condition and the events and crises that inflect individuals’ experiences of the everyday.

With his body of new paintings, de Balincourt constructs a tapestry of alternate realities that shadow our own, darkly reflecting the energies, longings, and sublimations in which the psychological fabric of daily life is woven.