JULES DE BALINCOURT – STUMBLING PIONEERS
2016-04-25Stumbling Pioneers, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Jules de Balincourt, which explores the frontier as a charged concept in contemporary culture. Painted on return to his hometown Los Angeles after a 20-year interval, these works road-trip through the mythic and geographically sprawling metropolis with an eye for man’s uncertain relationship with his environment.
Perched on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles has, since the pioneering age, been the limitless repository of America’s dreams of the frontier, of desires that saturate the sunsets, freeways, canyons and swimming pools that de Balincourt paints. This landscape, a disjunctured synthesis of the human, the architectural, and the organic, seems to temper idealistic energies: rather than striding boldly into the unknown, the figure drifts aimlessly through sunlit pockets of space, leisurely waiting for some ultimate opportunity for freedom. Here, the promise of the frontier – the hope of progress and the better life it inspires – coexists with a muddled reality of blurred boundaries between man and nature in a landscape that seems comprehensively colonised.
Poised between the strange and the familiar, the works that make up Stumbling Pioneers are rooted in the unmistakeable vibrant landscape of California, yet shaped by dreamlike associations that interconnect large-scale canvases and smaller works. Almost-transparent washes of paint build gradients of colour and form on these carefully constructed surfaces, on which the abstract remains visible amidst defined areas of representation.
Opposite – Truck Stop Blues, 2016
Exhibition runs through till May 14th, 2016
Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road
N1 7RW
London
