JULES DE BALINCOURT

Apparent freedoms and their human cost are foregrounded in a key painting such as People Who Play and The People Who Pay, 2004, in which divisions of labour and skin colour are all too familiar. Yet, through provocative detail or disconcerting shifts of scale, often the works destabilise their own apparent narratives.

In paintings such as the cityscape High and Low, the acid-bright leisure scene BBQ sur l’herbe, Firepeople and Visionquest, all 2013, where figures come together in hopes of spiritual enlightenment, de Balincourt has moved away from direct references to current social, political or popular culture, and instead depicts a world in which indications of specific place or time are absent. More recently, as in the paintings made for his 2016 Victoria Miro exhibition Stumbling Pioneers, de Balincourt explores the frontier as a charged concept in contemporary culture. Painted on return to his hometown Los Angeles after a 20-year interval, works such as Sanctuary, Truck Stop Blues and Night Moves, all 2016, road-trip through the mythic and geographically sprawling metropolis with an eye for man’s uncertain relationship with his environment.

De Balincourt’s process involves various techniques – including stencilling, masking, abrading and spray painting – that, from a distance, create an apparently seamless vision. Up close, however, the eye is caused to snag over deliberate disjunctions. A sense of things breaking apart is a powerful imaginative motor that finds a particularly strong visual correlation in de Balincourt’s map paintings, including the US World Studies series, where familiar territories are organised according to various hidden, unknown or unspoken criteria. Dual intimations of creation and destruction pulse through works such as Burst Painting, 2012, an ‘explosion’ of radiating colour where cause and effect remain mysterious.

Between explosive suns and flickering screens, de Balincourt invites us to journey across territories that might be celestial or earthbound, cartoon or cyber in origin to consider the physical and metaphysical in contemporary life. He paints a restless world both in form and content.

Jules de Balincourt, born in Paris, France in 1972, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. De Balincourt’s work has been the subject of a number of international solo exhibitions at institutions including Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel, 2015; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 2014–2015; Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, Rochechouart, 2014; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, 2013; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2010, and Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville, 2008. His work has also been included in a number of significant group exhibitions, including L’Ange de l’Histoire, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud at le Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 2013; New York Minute, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, 2011 and the 10th Havana Biennial, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, 2009.

Courtesy Victoria Miro