Jules de Balincourt Might Just Be Brooklyn’s Rousseau

Jules de Balincourt’s new show “Moving Landscapes” at Victoria Miró in London is full of wind-whipped seafoam foliage and roiling red island mountains—a vivid array of topographies sometimes peopled and sometimes placidly unperturbed. The French-American artist had a peripatetic upbringing, eventually studying ceramics in San Francisco and settling thereafter in New York, where his long-time studio at once served as a bustling community/events space. He is represented by Pace Gallery in New York and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris. Spike Jonze is one of his collectors.

We sat down with de Balincourt in said studio—luminous, sprawling, not far from Maria Hernandez Park—and discussed feeling unmoored, the internet’s tendency to collapse visual hierarchies and the artist’s eye as a canny filtration system.

Is your studio always this tidy?

I like to keep it neutral. I have no inspirational images; I like to keep it just me and the paintings—just that alchemy or transfer that happens from my mind to a realized painting. I want to keep it pure, although no matter what, it’s full of impurities or full of art history and references already. I just don’t want to be too distracted.

What’s your process like when you’re preparing for a show?

I’m usually working on multiple paintings at once. I start paintings, and then every week, introduce a new painting that responds to a prior painting. I’m interested in the free associations that come up when certain paintings are juxtaposed together—like how does the story elaborate suddenly? They could almost be sequels to each other, almost from a storyboard, but with no clear allegory or narrative.

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This painting, for instance, is this idea of all these different ships congregating. But it could be cargo ships, refugee ships, tourist ships or military ships. It’s alluding to the overall global anxiety. Then this painting is a sort of self-portrait. It doesn’t really look like me; I didn’t do it from a photo. It’s just me as an observer, reporting back through my own sort of strange visual vernacular.

I start off with no initial plan, purely abstractly, and it’s really, at first, this primitive, intuitive dance of going through these formal attributes of shape, color and stream-of-consciousness. Eventually, out of that abstraction, I mine an image—I’ll gravitate to a specific color or a thing that all of a sudden directs it into a more logical, intellectualized space. It really is the right side/left side of the brain. I like the tension between those two states of working and thinking.

Have you always worked that way?

When I was starting as a painter—I didn’t have formal training in painting—I was referencing photos. It was the late ‘90s: I had my first little digital camera; I was using photos as inspiration. In the early 2000s, I put away any kind of extra media. I wanted to have this pure transfer from my imagination to the canvas or the panel without preliminary studies. The initial idea is also the finalized idea. There’s no in-between. Part of it is my own personal exploration into my subconscious. A lot of artists will research a certain thing or be inspired by a certain book or respond to a certain article or movie, and for me, it’s really not as specific. I don’t like having one idea that I have to adhere to. I like the idea of an artist as a sieve, processing culture and information on a personal level and then also on a social, political and global level. What is it to be an artist in the 21st century with this bombardment of imagery and information?

That’s a very relevant question. How would you answer it? And what is your image consumption, or information consumption, like? 

It’s more than it should be. On my phone, there are my friends on a boat in Italy, and there are refugees off the coast of Italy… I’m processing both those images at once.

Or it’s like: you know when you’re reading an article in the New York Times on your phone and you can scroll and, all of a sudden, there’s an ad in the article, like a Tiffany’s bracelet. And at first, you’re not registering. You’re like, ‘Oh no, that’s not part of the article.’ There’s this scrambling of images. And now there’s a whole new dimension of A.I.—what’s even a real image or not a real image? I haven’t even wrapped my head around that yet.

A painting is such a still, stagnant thing—how does it stay relevant? Where is painting’s place in this world now, where images are dominated by memes and quick videos? Eventually, it’ll almost become a novelty. Maybe that will bring even more importance to it because it will become more of an archaic, anachronistic act.

Do you think that change in attention span has irreparably damaged what it takes to engage with a painting?

With the rise of social media, I think people’s capabilities to stay put with anything for longer than a minute is a miracle. It’s harder and harder to keep people’s attention, so demanding someone look at a painting is not always an easy task if people don’t necessarily—myself included—have the patience.

Even if you don’t have concrete sources of inspiration, what are you preoccupied by these days?

In a lot of my images, there are recurring motifs. After twenty-five years of painting, you realize there are these recurring archetypes: nature, Edenic gatherings, boats. There’s this common theme of community: the collective, the social dynamics between groups. Some of the imagery also deals with notions of escapism or migration or travel. I like when things can teeter in between two worlds: this sort of optimistic, life-affirming vision, or swaying darker and more sinister. Then there are people within the context of nature, their relationship with nature or their vulnerability with nature, or their minuteness within nature, or nature as a form of escape or sanctuary.

Nature is a freeing space, and painting nature is a freeing act. The act of painting becomes a refuge in the physical, literal sense of painting. I want my work to be about a certain liberty or freedom, where it’s open-ended, flowing, fluid and not limited to a singular picture plane or idea. I want it to be kinetic.

Speaking of nature, I read that you spend a lot of time in Costa Rica. Is that still true? 

Yeah, I live there part-time. I have a studio there, and I work there mostly in the wintertime. I’ve been going there for 30 years. My childhood best friend moved there, and I went there initially for surfing, and then eventually I ended up building a house and making it my escape from New York, and it’s definitely been an inspiration in my work.

I also want my work to operate on a more global level. Earlier in my career, my work was more specific to America. It was more politically and socially engaged. Over the years, I’ve withdrawn my gaze from the US, and it’s more of a humanistic gaze into the world—more like a general, all-encompassing audience.

But nature in general—Costa Rican, of course—is a source of inspiration. The vitality and energy of the jungle is the ultimate polarity of New York City’s concrete jungle. I’m almost like Brooklyn’s Rousseau [the 18th-century French philosopher/writer who idealized the state of nature]. None of the paintings look like Bushwick. Maybe it’s about escaping this place. But the energy of New York—and the vitality and diversity of New York—without a doubt, is an inspiration.

Right, it’s just not a literal translation.

It’s not. Painting nature is also another access into the more primitive. These are trees, but really, they’re just loose. When you’re painting something realistic, something within a city or society, it’s 90-degree angles. When it’s nature, I can show you in a minute how to make a tree with a couple of markings.

I want to get more into mysticism and spirituality. But I don’t like using the word “spiritual.” It’s too easily thrown around. I want something more cosmic, not the representational picture. I want to break away from the logic of pictures and get more into the psychological and emotional element of painting.

You spent your formative years in California. Do you still feel Californian?

I definitely identify more as a California artist, even though I’ve been in New York for twenty-four years… I’ve been here literally almost half my life. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. But those early years, somehow it was a formative moment. When I’m in France, I’m a little bit like the reasonable American. When I’m in America, I’m a little bit the critical asshole French guy.

You’re an outlier wherever you are.

I’m a California dude, but I’m also really still French to some of my friends. I think my outspoken, straightforward no-bullshit self is not my California side. In California, oh my god, everything’s wonderful. And France is like, ‘I don’t think this is a very good piece. It’s not so interesting.’

As you’re prepping for your show, is it hard to know when a painting is done? How do you find that final peace of mind?

When the information has been put out there, the rest is just dilly-dallying or becomes self-indulgent mark-making. Knowing when to step back is sort of a challenge for me. It’s tricky.

Do you know Rick Rubin? He produced all the big acts of the ‘90s, like Nine Inch Nails, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jay Z. He did this book recently called The Creative Act. I’m skeptical of all those self-help kind of books—this is usually not my thing. But this was really inspiring to listen, as an audiobook, to his approach to creativity. A lot of it is cliches you’ve already heard, like turning off the inner critic, but it was helpful for me. He has a sort of sage, Buddhist approach that is inspiring. Lots of people in the art world are constantly referencing it now.

“Moving Landscapes” is on view through November 2 at Victoria Miró in London.