California Native, 2016 Oil and acrylic on panel 111.8 x 121.9 cm 44 x 48 in.
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London
© Jules de Balincourt
When Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the musicians behind Steely Dan, moved out to LA from the east coast in 1971, they found the visual equivalent of their slick and expansive music in the heat haze and palm-lined avenues of the Pacific metropolis. Or is it more likely that their music started to open up in response to the grand, languid and unwalkable vistas of the west coast? Landscapes can engender complex responses; mythologies, iconography and aesthetics which, more often than not, leave the real thing struggling to fulfil expectations. The various mythologies of the American West, being among the most ubiquitous in modern culture, also make it difficult to view almost any artwork which takes them as its subject with fresh eyes, such is the power of the iconography which has already accumulated around the subject.
In each of the paintings in Jules de Balincourt’s current show at Victoria Miro, ‘Stumbling Pioneers’, we encounter many of the visual triggers we might expect on the subject: empty swimming pools, a truck stop, a molten sunset, a freeway winding through the edgelands of the city. It is almost surprising to see each motif dealt with so concisely in individual panels. The initial impression is of an outsider’s perspective; an attempt to document the city and its surroundings in a series of illustrative vignettes, executed by someone who is seeing them for the first time perhaps. De Balincourt is in fact painting these works after a period of 20 years spent outside LA. So after such a long absence one could be forgiven for feeling, at least partly, like an outsider.
Night Moves, 2016 Oil on panel 121.9 x 101.6 cm 48 x 40 in.
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London
© Jules de Balincourt
The works are of various dimensions, painted on wooden panels which float about an inch or so off the wall on recessed wooden supports. The hidden supports are each treated with the predominant colour of the image itself. Some of these colours are almost fluorescent, and the effect from a distance is of a subtle coloured backlight to each panel. Most of them are painted in oil, but some use both oil and acrylic. The application of these two very different types of paint on the same panel is executed so well as to make them almost indistinguishable. Continue reading “Jules de Balincourt | Stumbling Pioneers @ Victoria Miro, 15 April – 14 May 2016.”
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