It takes a while to tie all of Jules de Balincourt’s threads into a coherent visual sweater. The French-American artist’s bright, simple figurative paintings here are filled with boats and planes, thousands of tiny people and enormous, semi-transparent giants. The little people sit in caves, or dance around statues, while the giants seem to watch over it all like ghosts.
But one little work kinda gives it away. A bloated orange man with thick, greenish-yellow hair leads a line of pale figures in berating a line of dark-skinned people. Sound the Trump klaxon.
It’s kind of a shame that it all gets given away by that one work. Most of these paintings feel spiritual, ambiguous, filled with an unknowable narrative - their colours clashing and smashing together into a somehow calming ocean of neon. The work doesn’t need to scream ‘Trump’ because all these ideas of movement and communality in the face of adversity come across already. It takes a while, but they come. Jules maybe didn’t need to toot his Trump-et to make his point.
@eddyfrankel
