Interviews, Issue 8

Jules de Balincourt

Stories of migration and movement

Words JAE KIM

Photography VINCENT TULLO

Spending time with Jules de Balincourt was like immersing oneself in the vibrant heartbeat of Bushwick. His studio, once a community space, buzzed with the energy of diverse voices and creative spirits. As we walked through the neighborhood, de Balincourt’s deep connection to his surroundings became evident. He spoke passionately about how the community’s diversity and vibrancy shape his work, infusing his canvases with stories of migration and movement. He made it clear that his paintings are not just a reflection of his talent but also of the people and places that inspire him.

JAE KIM: Your paintings often blur the lines between reality and imagination, creating worlds that seem both familiar and surreal. How do you approach these layered realities in your practice?

JULES DE BALINCOURT: Most of my paintings, even though they often fall into a narrative or figurative quality, begin as purely abstract imagined spaces. For me, painting is a merging of the physical, abstract, intuitive, primordial self, contrasting with the rational, intellectual self. Painting is a place where these two states of being merge, and at which one point, a leap is made from the initial abstract to the finalized logical, representational mode.

JK: How have themes (or ideas) of migration and mobility influenced the shaping of your visual narratives, particularly in capturing moments of transition and transformation?

JdB: Well, coming from a strictly personal perspective, ideas of migration and immigration are central to my work since I immigrated to America from France as a young child. Throughout much of my childhood, I lived a very itinerant lifestyle, constantly moving, traveling, adapting, and assimilating. Throughout my work, water becomes a metaphor and symbol for borders and boundaries, while alternatively also being a metaphor for fluidity, travel, and being adrift. In addition, boats which populate these seascapes become metaphors for leisure, trade, and escape.

JK: How has the fluidity of your own life experiences, particularly your time in Brooklyn, influenced the fluid, almost dreamlike quality present in recent works like Nocturnal Nomads, 2023 and Les Arriviste, 2023?

JdB: I think the fluidity in my life, as well as bodies of water and ocean in my paintings, somehow represent the fluidity and travel and bohemian lifestyle of my early childhood. Moving throughout Europe before immigrating to California in the late ’70s was an important part of my early foundation and development which from an early age put me in a position of being an outsider of sorts, or perpetual tourist, gazing into new cultures, observing, adapting, assimilating, or defying.

JK: You paint intuitively rather than sourcing inspiration from images, and I want to know how you begin a painting. It’s fascinating, because everyone can have their own imaginative interpretation when looking at your work. I feel like I am traveling to an unknown world when I encounter your paintings.

JdB: I also feel like I’m traveling through an unknown world when I begin my paintings. I like the idea of painting as a road trip rather than a commute. The painting reveals itself to me layer by layer, instead of a predetermined template or idea.

In a day and age when we are so bombarded and submerged in stimulation and image overload, I’ve made a conscious decision to rely on my own memory bank, refraining from really working from photography or any outsourced imagery. I’m interested to see how my personal memory bank constructs and composes images, and what themes or ideas resurface, and how the personal and political intermingle, how world events and my personal experience navigating through this tumultuous world are transferred into a visual tableau.