The man who paints the good, the bad and the ugly of modern California
The man who paints the good, the bad and the ugly of modern California
By Jonathan Griffin
In Jules de Balincourt's paintings, the romance of Los Angeles is spiked with something darker
In the early 2000s, painting was in the doldrums. Artists who persevered with the medium were generally seen as being overly academic or conceptual. New York-based painter Jules de Balincourt, who shot to attention while still in college in 2003, helped change all that.
In lush nocturnal cityscapes, often viewed from above, he combined the wistful romance of Peter Doig with that of older artists such as Edward Hopper. Some critics called his style “faux-naive”; de Balincourt hates the term.
Charles Saatchi snapped up his work, and included him in his landmark survey of contemporary American art USA Today at the Royal Academy, London, in 2006. Four years later, Saatchi sold de Balincourt’s US World Studies II (2005) – a rearranged map of the United States, depicted as an island – for £277,250, and his work now regularly fetches six figures.
I meet de Balincourt in a borrowed studio near Downtown Los Angeles, where he’s just spent six months evading the New York winter and preparing work for a new exhibition in London. In contrast to his early, more politicised pictures – such as the 2004 hotel scene The People Who Play and the People Who Pay, showing sunbathing guests and brown-skinned servers – his new paintings feel quiet and reflective, even if de Balincourt’s seeming paradises are rarely trouble-free.
Loosely painted Edenic jungle landscapes are inhabited by campers or quad-bikers; a night-time view of a road snaking through mountains shows traffic backing up for miles. “The California I come back to is a compressed California, full of people,” says de Balincourt, who spent his teenage years in the hills above Malibu. “There are more people, more highways. There are no longer secret places, secret sanctuaries. It feels over-saturated.”