Jules de Balincourt This Is Our Town

Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL) is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Jules de Balincourt. The exhibition runs between March 3 - April 2, 2005.

As suggested by the show's title, taken from the scoreboard overlooking Madison Square Garden, "This Is Our Town," explores a tension between leisure, survival, and the polarized paranoia between "us" and "them." Themes of surveillance, destruction, and looming breaches of privacy comprise this series of playfully sinister works.

Disjointed environments are represented by inserting individuals in the foreground of scenic landscapes, and distinctions between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" remain ambiguous. In Insiders and Outsiders, masked operatives loom in the foreground of an opulent landscape guarded by surveillance towers. Vast voids circled by faceless workers are viewed from above in two other paintings, Ambitious New Plans and The Watchtower, while weekend hikes might be confused for urban flight in Head for the Hills.

In response to the fetish for disaster, Personal Survival Doom Buggy, designed in collaboration with Paul Stec, is a customized vehicle. Featured atop a rotating pedestal, the registered and fully functional survival vehicle literalizes implications of escape in earlier sculptures, including Treehouse. Built for a single person, it comes complete with enough food and water to survive for five days, along with equipment such as gas masks, chemical suits, and camping stoves.

Receding from earlier visions of prewar optimism, this collection of works presents a darker vision of our divided socioeconomic terrain. Referring to themes of escape while ambiguously representing the divisions between work and leisure, we loom as voyeurs on the edge of these landscapes.

Jules de Balincourt was born in 1972 in Paris, France. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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Jules de Balincourt "This Is Our Town"