Tag: france

Jules de Balincourt: Precision and Abstraction

Franco-American painter Jules de Balincourt ruminates on abstraction, utopia and the accessibility of art, at the opening of his latest exhibition

Another Divided Island, 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

If contemporary art is frequently found to be conceptually obscure, exasperatingly self-referential or weighed down with lofty ideals, then the vibrant works of Brooklyn-based artist Jules de Balincourt may be just the antidote. With nothing more new-age than oil on panel, he has produced paintings that project a powerful radiance from within an abstracted haze. Imposing landscapes inhabited by roaming communities, each work is arrestingly aestheticised in a way another artist might find beneath them, but De Balincourt owns it. “Art for me, it always was about beauty and seduction at a certain level, the first thing that draws you to art is to be pulled into it, seduced by it.” He hurriedly adds, “but it can’t just be sugar-coated sweetness, I need an edge or tension or… I like the idea of these paintings standing at a crossroad where it could go either way. I like to leave that suspense.”

If Queens Ruled 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

De Balincourt was born in Paris, although from the age of nine he was raised in Malibou Lake, California. He has stated in interviews that he doesn’t identify as either entirely French or American, although with France recently voting in Macron over the far-right, populist Le Pen, it is clear that his mind is very much focused on the troubled and divided times facing the United States. It is almost a year since Trump’s inauguration when I meet him at the installation of his new show, They Cast Long Shadows, at Victoria Miro in Mayfair. Perched on stools in the main gallery, we are surrounded by these new works, and he gesticulates energetically whenever he seeks a point of reference.

Troubled Eden 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

The show is an accumulation of activity from only the past few months, although this is in fact an arbitrary marker. “It’s just a continuation of what I’ve always done in some ways. There’s never a big drastic shift… I consider each show like another page in the same book.” De Balincourt is very precise about his process, if only to articulate its imprecision. Each painting is begun in abstract until, floating in the brushstrokes, “I find something to grasp onto and it eventually becomes figures.” These little populations in turn create a landscape from the floating impressionistic forms by transforming their surroundings into a coherent space. It is unplanned and instinctive, and de Balincourt eschews the use of photography or preliminary sketches. “I’m always working intuitively and unconsciously, I’m interested in my own self-discovery through making this work.”

This approach has informed the show’s installation process too, “I’m interested in the free-associative elements that come up when two completely different images are juxtaposed but I know they still somehow relate.” For all their chance origins, De Balincourt’s landscapes are highly expressive and their metaphorical power leaves them steeped in narrative potential.

Big Little Monsters 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

The island, a recurrent motif for the artist, who is also a keen surfer, has unfixed and shifting applications. In Island People the pastel pink island is an ‘Edenic comfort zone’ or a sanctuary where people freely congregate. In Divided Island, however, a gathering perches on one island and stares across a channel to another larger land mass that recedes into the distance. It speaks of islands that are insular and isolating with a resonance that is at once timeless and timely, as de Balincourt confirms – “it’s a subtle jab at Brexit”.

His work has long toyed with a tension between the utopian and dystopian, although he admits, “I think my work, when I was younger, was a little bit more direct. Now I push myself to delve more into the unconscious, the abstract, the intuitive and see what comes up.” This is inevitably influenced by real world events, which have recently loomed in the minds of many. “The real challenge under the Trump administration is how to confront the current situation at all… I don’t really know how to address it directly but I know that subconsciously I am concerned about what’s happening in America.”

Repeated Histories 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

In his recent move towards greater abstraction, de Balincourt has found avenues to address those issues. Even the most obvious work, Repeated Histories, in which a robust orange-faced man directs a small accusatory finger towards a row of black men, makes use of abstracting techniques such as repetition and distorted scale to reflect real power structures. Other works in the collection take a softer approach, and one that is distinctly undogmatic. The art is deliberately accessible, with de Balincourt entirely unconvinced by the social or political impact of art that he considers “convoluted and hyper-conceptual… completely wrapped up in a hermetically sealed corner of the art world. My work is in a weird way a resistance to that pretentiousness and elitism,” he stares intently at a canvas across the room before turning to me with a grin, “but then again, you know, I’m starting to sound like a Trump supporter.”

Cave Country, 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

De Balincourt’s work seems simple, yet strikes to the core of a complex conversation. In these dreamy worlds, at least, the utopian defeats the dystopian and de Balincourt announces, “I wanted to be optimistic. I wanted to still give hope.” At one point he gestures towards Cave Country, a large canvas in which a deep crevasse of hot oranges and warm pink cuts into a turquoise rock to house a crowd seeking refuge. He pauses carefully before declaring, “I like to think of it as a place away from the chaos of the rest of the world.”

They Cast Long Shadows is at the Victoria Miro Gallery until 24 March 2018.

Revisiting Eugène Atget’s Paris

Photographer Christopher Rauschenberg rediscovers the sites captured by celebrated flâneur and early pioneer of photography, Eugène Atget, revealing a city constantly evolving and yet remaining, curiously, exactly the same

Eugène Atget photographed Paris from 1888 until his death in 1927. Like many people, I consider him the greatest photographer of all time. He documented the city in a straightforward way, his images evoking the feeling that all the transitory things that people make, all the things they do, are washed away, leaving only their transcendent evidence.

I have known Atget’s works from my earliest days as a photographer, seeking them out in books and museum shows whenever possible. On a trip to Paris in 1989, I suddenly found myself face to face with a spiral-topped gatepost that I knew very well from a photograph by Atget. I rephotographed his gatepost from memory and wondered how many other Atget subjects might still be holding their poses. When I found a familiar-looking stone stairway in another neighbourhood, I looked around for the huge, beautiful tree that in Atget’s photograph loomed over a flower vase on a corner post, but I could not find it. The flower vase on the other side of the stairs, however, did have a tree behind it, so I photographed that side instead. I wanted to match the poetic meaning of the image more than I wanted to show that the magnificent tree was gone.

In Paris that year, in the streets and places that Atget had admired, I resolved to return and explore with my camera whether the haunting and beautiful city of his vision still existed. Between 1997 and 1998, I made three trips to Paris and rephotographed five hundred of the outdoor scenes that Atget had photographed. (I could not, of course, revisit the interiors that he had pictured or recapture the people in his views.)

It is clear that the Paris of Atget’s vision still exists and is available to eyes that look for it. In central Paris, in particular, most of the places that Atget photographed are still there, and still posing. You can see the effects of weathering and acid rain on them; you can see the disrespectful marks of graffiti; and most of all, you can see that the magical streets of the city are choked with traffic and parked cars. However, among all the other Parises that coexist so thickly in one amazing metropolis, Atget’s Paris is still definitely and hauntingly there.

This is an excerpt from Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugene Atget’s Paris by Christopher Rauschenberg, published by Princeton Architectural Press

The Bistro: Art and Eating

George Upton reflects on the bistro, the humble eatery that has spawned revolution, some of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century, and a uniquely Parisian way of life

Bystro! Bystro!

It’s 30th March 1814 and the streets of Paris are ringing with the cries of Cossack troops. For almost two years, following Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, the soldiers have been chasing the French army back across the continent, and now they are in the capital, victorious and hungry. “Quickly! Quickly! Bystro! Bystro!” they shout impatiently, quite possibly becoming the first foreigners to complain about Parisian customer service, as well as inadvertently coining the name of one of the most important social, cultural and, of course, culinary institutions in French history.

At least that’s one theory; the ranks of France’s gastronomic historians are yet to agree on the etymological heritage of the humble bistro, though there is a consensus that these cheap, informal eateries – part bar, part café, part restaurant – have been central in shaping French culture. After all, not long before the impatient Cossacks, it was in these simple Parisian dining rooms that – fuelled by inexpensive, traditional fare – debate and discord would boil over into the revolution of 1789.

Later the bistro would help foster some of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. Still cheap and unassuming, it was at this time that the bistro would come of age: jacketed, white-aproned waiters floating through tables of solitary readers and rowdy drunks, carrying casserole and carafes of wine, the bustle of the street half muted by curtains pinned just above eye level. It was here, amidst the pimps and anarchists of the Lapin Agile in Montmartre, that Picasso would talk and drink and define the course of modern art with Modigliani and Maurice Utrillo, as Satie and Debussy sat at the piano. Or where, across the Seine at the Polidor, Hemingway would write – recording the trials of his lost generation and fellow literary expats, James Joyce and Henry Miller – and drink, and fight.

Today, the number of bistros has dwindled – 8,000 in Paris, down from 50,000 at the turn of the century – and many of those that remain have moved away from their uncomplicated culinary origins, but the tradition of the bistro remains strong. Immortalised in the ideas they fostered, still populated by thinkers and drinkers, the bistros are a living museum to a uniquely Parisian attitude to life, art and eating.

This is an extract from issue 21 of Port, out now. To buy or subscribe, click here.

A Museum of Light in Nantes

A total transformation of the Musee d’arts de Nantes carried out by London-based architecture practice Stanton Williams has reimagined the museum as a modern shrine to natural light

In recent years, scores of museums and galleries have sought to rebrand themselves with bold extensions and redesigns. While the objective is often the same, approaches and execution tend to vary almost as much as the results and their reception; by turns controversial or celebrated, triumphant or tragic.

For architects, the task of bridging past and present is marked by competing concerns, and there is a case to be made for architectural intervention with a studied sense of place. Even where contrast appears single-minded, it is underpinned by the need to conserve and modernise at the same time. In the case of the Musee d’arts de Nantes (formerly the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes), British architecture practice Stanton Williams has engaged the opposing forces of continuity and transformation in thoughtful dialogue throughout the museum’s all-encompassing overhaul. Here, sensitivity is tantamount to success. 

Since winning the commission in 2009, Stanton Williams has spent the last six years on the project, drawing on founding director Paul Williams’ background in exhibition design and architectural planning for museums and galleries. The practice’s vision for the museum extends far beyond the usual scope and encompasses a full-scale interior renovation of the original Palais des Beaux-Arts, a new extension for contemporary art, a new graphic arts centre, a sculpture court, and a new link to the 17th century oratory chapel, where a video triptych by American artist Bill Viola is on permanent display. Uniquely, the architects have also collaborated with London-based design studio Cartlidge Levene to redesign the museum’s visual identity – including exhibition design, interior design and signage – in order to create a seamless experience. 

Internal view of Palais with installation by Susanna Fritscher © Hufton + Crow

While excavating the Palais, digging six metres down into the ground to create new spaces beneath the Beaux-Arts building, they uncovered the hand-laid stonework making up its foundations. “This is the beauty of unpicking things,” says Williams. Archways of exposed stone have been incorporated into the minimal appearance of the lower-ground floor, understatedly bringing old and new into balance and reflecting a subtle attention to detail apparent throughout the whole project. 

Patrick Richard, the lead architect on the redesign and director at Stanton Williams, explains that the marble, brass and wood used throughout also aim to heighten the senses. “Every time people engage physically with the building – benches, doors, walls – all of these materials create something very sensual.”

The renovated Palais des Beaux-Arts and its extensions make the gentle Atlantic light – which floods in through the pitched skylights and illuminates the abundance of alabaster – strangely physical. The shaft of an old service elevator inside the Palais has been remade in translucent glass, tunnelling diffuse light down from roof to the basement, while existing skylights have been fitted with layers of glass, stretched fabric and adjustable blinds as part of a complex system that helps optimise natural light.

This continues in the new contemporary art extension, the Cube, where one facade is clad with ultra thin sheets of Portuguese marble, hung between two pieces of glass. During the day, light from outside filters through, and at night, glows from within, throwing veins of marble into relief. At only 7mm, it is so thin that shadows can be seen on the other side. Richard refers to it as a contemporary fresco of sorts. 

“The Palais was very introverted in some ways but in the upper galleries, the sky and the light gives you a sense that you are part of a city as well,” he says, returning to the original building designed by local architect Clément-Marie Josso and planned around a central courtyard. “The clouds pass, the light changes. The space is open and you are part of something else.” This thinking, which puts the play of light at the heart of the Musee d’arts de Nantes, informed each step of Stanton Williams’ soft-footed approach. “This is a museum of light.”

As it reopens to the public under a new name, the Musee d’arts de Nantes takes its place as the sixth largest fine arts institution in France. The museum has been a beacon of Nantes’ cultural standing since it opened in 1900. Now, its collection of over 12,000 works spanning 13th century to contemporary has a home truly fit to rival anything in the French capital.

The Musee d’arts de Nantes is now open to the public