NADA Miami 2023

Jules de Balincourt translates both personal and collective experiences into celebrated paintings that have been exhibited widely around the world. His work emerges from intuition, tapping into a personal interest in using paint—regarded by the artist as a primitive and archaic material—as a vehicle for transcribing images within the context of a rapidly developing technological age. Born in Paris in 1972 and raised in California, he graduated from California College of the Arts and Crafts, San Francisco in 1998, and earned a Master of Fine Art at Hunter College, New York in 2005. Now based between Brooklyn, New York and Malpais, Costa Rica, Balincourt has work in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, France; and other institutions around the world.

A richly saturated scene of a park or garden by night, Are You An Insider or Outsider juxtaposes the nearly fluorescent contours of tall trees against a cluster of skyscrapers that spill across a surrounding cityscape. Details within the plants that inhabit this technicolor world are portrayed by varying shades of pinks and reds, additionally emphasized by dark shadows that bear the same tones as the inky, deep violet sky. Although the image is devoid of figures, human presence is insinuated by the placement of outdoor furniture within the garden, as well as the lit windows that dot the buildings in the foreground. The work is intended by Balincourt to depict the delicate relationship between urban and rural, as well as man’s relationship to both nature and the metropolis. In his own words, “I’ve always been interested in where the organic and the technological co-exist.”