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.

Recent paintings by the artist continue an intuitive approach to image-making, where the world we inhabit is filtered through the artist’s own psychological landscape. Always rich in colour and technique, de Balincourt’s work is a bountiful confluence of reality and fantasy, where references to society, politics, or popular culture are never less than equalled by free association and painterly invention. In Troubled Eden, 2017, for example, a snaking river, encroached upon by signs of human activity, is worn like a shift dress by a figure with a sharp fringe and an assertive, red-carpet stance. In other works, de Balincourt paints nocturnal landscapes, figures seeking refuge, monsters that resemble monuments, glowing caves. Everywhere, dreamlike distortions and disconcerting shifts in scale create a sense of eeriness and imbalance. There is an unsettling atmosphere to these new paintings, suggestive of a world in flux. Yet, undeniable too, is a sense of optimism, a persistence of spirit, or a suggestion of how things might be different – with a collective leap of imagination, or if power was held in other hands.  

About the artist

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 Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain (2021); Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel, Germany (2015); The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA (2014–2015); Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, Rochechouart France (2014); Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, USA (2013); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2010) and Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville, USA (2008). Other significant solo exhibitions include Jules de Balincourt: Midnight Movers, Pace, New York, USA (2023); Jules de Balincourt: Birds on a Boat, Pace, Hong Kong, China (2022); There are more eyes than leaves on the trees, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France (2020); There are more eyes than leaves on the trees, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France; One Island Many People, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, Denmark; They Cast Long Shadows, Victoria Miro, London, UK (2018); We Come Together at Night, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria (2017); Stumbling Pioneers, Victoria Miro, London, UK (2016).

His work has also been included in a number of significant group exhibitions, including Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes, Acquavella Galleries, Florida, USA (2022); Rehang, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2019 - ongoing); Les Enfants du Paradis, MUba Eugene Leroy Tourcoing, France (2019) and Eldorama, Le Tripostal, Lille, France (2019) both as part of Eldorado: Lille 3000 (2019); The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (MDD), Deurle, Belgium (2018); The New Frontiers of Painting, Fondazione Stelline, Milan, Italy (2017); The Universe and Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2016); L'Ange de l'Histoire, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud at le Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France (2013); New York Minute, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia (2011) and the 10th Havana Biennial, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba (2009).

Works by the artist are included in the collections of Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, USA; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; MaRT, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart, Rochechouart, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, ME, USA, among others.