Jules de Balincourt: Itinerant Ones is reviewed in The Guardian

The day has a holiday air. People are out on their rooftops or standing about on patches of green. I can't tell what time of day it is – let's say the afternoon – or the season; the soft sunlight and hazy distance, where unending buildings rise in the thickening sky, make me think of late summer or early autumn. That was the time of year the painting was finished, so maybe something of the world crept into the Brooklyn studio where Jules de Balincourtpainted High and Low, completing the large group of paintings now at Victoria Miro Gallery.

High and Low is filled with the kind of modern, aspirational shoebox architecture you find everywhere; a ubiquitous banality hemming diminutive bits of 19th-century Greek revival – a stray townhouse and a distant set of steps that seem to lead nowhere. Here and there the cityscape gets fudged. It is a world unfinished, or about to give up on itself. At points the perspective goes astray, the buildings warping out of alignment. Some of the figures don't seem quite solid, either, or have forgotten to bring their shadows with them. At one point, the sky abandons its pretence, and you can see the whirls and knots of the plywood panel on which it was painted. It is like The Truman Show.

This is something we often care not to remember when we look at a painting. We know the birds are just ticks of paint and the world is just smears and blobs on a sheet of board, or a bit of cloth stretched over a frame and fastened there with cheap industrial staples or a row of carpet tacks. You'd be an idiot not to acknowledge the something and nothing that is a painting, but even more of a fool to reduce it to bare material fact. The world is always about to fall apart, and us with it, so it's best to acknowledge the happenstance miracle of being alive...