Jules De Balincourt
Born in Paris, 1972 and lives in Brooklyn, NY
Jules De Balincourt was born in 1972 in Paris, France, and he currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Jules spent his childhood in the Malibou Lake area in the Santa Monica Mountains. He was educated in the San Francisco Bay Area at the California College of the Arts (CCA), receiving a BFA in ceramics in 1998 and went on to study in New York City at the Hunter College graduating in 2005 with an MFA.
Jules de Balincourt’s paintings are states of mind rather than descriptions of the world around us. He approaches painting as an intuitive process, creating fantasy-like worlds in which landscapes and seascapes interplay with more abstract compositions.
In de Balincourt’s work, land and sea become sites of possibility and escape, while also carrying an undercurrent of mysterious unease. Rather than relying on sketches, photography or direct reference, his process begins with the building up of many translucent layers of paint, moving from abstraction towards a figurative depiction. In these ambiguous, evocative spaces — where figures appear in continual motion — one senses the rhythm of an ever-changing, volatile world. At times, landscapes and figures dissolve into more abstract imagery, retaining figurative elements that suggest meditation or escape from reality. Large and small paintings often coexist, sometimes arranged in a salon-style display, encouraging viewers to free-associate between the images presented.
