FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

Color-Drenched Paintings Capture LA’s Pioneer Spirit

In his new exhibit, Jules de Balincourt turns up his ‘California Love.'
Jules de Balincourt, Canyon Kids, 2016. All images courtey of Victoria Miro Gallery

Jules de Balincourt first hit the art world as a Bush-era firebrand; “BUSH SUCKS” read one early painting, “UNITED WE STOOD,” another. But the French-American artist’s work has evolved away from the overtly political, and the works in his latest solo show find de Balincourt tackling Americana in a gentler, more subtle way. He focuses on the mythic city in which he grew up: Los Angeles.

Born in France, de Balincort spent much of his childhood in California. Though he’s been associated with New York throughout much of his professional life, the paintings in Stumbling Pioneers, which will be displayed in London’s Victoria Miro Gallery, were created in his first American home, to which he’s returned after a 20-year absence. Aside from a few paintings—a city birthed from a desert landscape, a palm-tree flanked swimming pool—most of the works don’t explicitly read “LA.” Instead, the pieces radiate a quiet intimacy and warm hues that suggest the SoCal sun. “Los Angeles has, since the pioneering age, been the limitless repository of America’s dreams of the frontier,” reads the exhibit’s press release, and the featured paintings echo this sense of LA as a place where fantasy must reckon with reality.

Advertisement

The scenes depicted spring from De Balincourt's imagination. His process is "‘a very intuitive dance in the dark of brushes and pigments," he says. "So in a way it is about this intersection in my mind when I abandon the more unknowing primitive approach, finding something that inspires or I need to pursue."

Patriots, 2016

Jules de Balincourt’s Stumbling Pioneers runs at London’s Victoria Miro Gallery from 14 April through 14 May. For more information, click here.

Related:

$120,000 Harmony Korine Painting Stolen in Soho

Painting's Evolution in the Digital Age

Creatives Outsource Oil Painting Inspirations to Chinese Artist Village