6 September – 18 October 2014

Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presented the third solo exhibition of works by Jules de Balincourt with the beguiling title Blue Hours.

The ‘Michel Houellebecq’ of painting, as Jean-Marc Bustamante called him, explored private themes that evoke architecture, travel, human migrations and artificial places, in a floating, idealized and escapist atmosphere with hints of a pervading vulnerability.

Balincourt threw himself directly into his painting without drawing or other preliminaries. He created whole worlds out of patches of bright colours that he reacted to in a subconsciously primitive state of intuition, constructing universes bathed in a silent, ambiguous reality to which our response is out of kilter with the way that that reality is represented. It was difficult to distinguish what might be an imaginary environment from a landscape by the sea, or a daylight scene from what is perhaps a night view. What remains, though, was a sensation of delight, with intimations of danger in the offing.