Jules de Balincourt. Parallel Universe

Parallel Universe is a body of work which Jules de Balincourt has realized specifically for Collezione Maramotti. The five new paintings presented in the exhibition have never been shown before, and now become part of the Collection. As is often the case with de Balincourt, the paintings were all worked on at the same time, in the same studio, allowing them to gradually come into dialogue with one another as a direct result of his studio practice. The artist’s approach to his work is largely intuitive: preferring that the paintings evolve organically as he goes back and forth between them, and they take shape individually and as an ensemble. The paintings in Parallel Universe can thus be seen as forming a kind of loosely interlocked map, one that explores and charts the relationships between representation and abstraction, and the act of painting. The image of the map in the artist’s previous work has been frequently discussed in terms of its political and cartographic dimensions. But Big Globe Painting and Globe Faces – the map-based works presented here – de Balincourt frees himself from any obligation to accurately represent the world in terms of continents, countries, and borders. Attempting instead to render a more universal sense of time and space, the artist reminds us that we also inhabit inner worlds, and he arrives at a representation that is truer to life than mere geography. These images, which verge on the abstract, as much of his recent work does, are symbolic rather than diagrammatic, and can thus be seen as representing a need for liberation, not only as de Balincourt moves increasingly from figuration towards the abstract, but also in terms of freedom from the modes of rational and objective thought.

Jules de Balincourt
Parallel Universe