Caught between the fictive moments of memory and place, an arcane dwelling somehow slips across the scene: Where is this passage I have once been? The whole landscape is at once unknowable and familiar, like a sequence from a dream. But dreams can be drawn from anywhere in our time and can accumulate from several encounters: from experience, from photographs, and from the seeds of unrealized desires. An image is now “bound neither to truth nor reality,” according to Baudrillard, and their appearances can prove to be as doubtful as they are powerful.

Victor Balanon, in his attempt to investigate the nature of image-production, asks questions similar to what Baudrillard might have raised about appearances: How is it that we remember things differently via images from how they actually are? Why is it that images in our memories change over time? In Victor Balanon’s new series of works entitled “And in Arcadia,” he continues his search for answers regarding the nature of images, especially in an age where spectators have become accustomed to viewing them through incredible speed and at an incredible rate. Films, digital movies, and streaming videos not only have begun to appear more seamless with the number of frames that comprise them but have crowded our senses with their overwhelming presence through various media.

Victor Balanon, in his own words, calls for a “reintroduction” of images—to a new way of looking at scenes that have since bombarded the senses. He coerces a new kind of meditation from the hyperreal qualities of moving images such as film and video. By referencing his works to Poussin’s painting, “Et in Arcadia ego,” which is a quintessential representation of the pastoral and idyllic scene, he transforms the cinema’s slight-of-hand—its power to stitch a succession of images, to manipulate the audience’s gaze, and to attribute characters with qualities that absorb the viewers within its story—into a deliberate, one-to-one correspondence with its essential component: the single frame.

Through his meticulous process of drawing using ink, he produces landscapes and settings that appear void of context. The depicted scenes (derived from films by auteurs such as Tarkovsky and Bergman, who themselves have ascribed to locations that are neither here nor there) are conceived through a process of abstraction and erasure. The lifted pictures do not stand as exact replicas nor film stills. The scene has been manipulated, through the artist’s own approximation and style, and has been cleared of characters—actors who contribute to the illusion. The landscape, which was once an unassuming backdrop, becomes an impression of a place, like residues from a fleeting memory, bold yet inexact.

Like Poussin’s allusion to the place, Arcadia, Balanon’s works evoke visions that seem to dedicate themselves to nothing but harmony and order through their composition within the frame. It is utopia restricted within the process of image-making. The lonesome vehicles that were once minor prop, becomes the centerpiece of the composition where light and shadow are bound to interact; the trails and tracks toward barnyards and cottages that are now deserted mark an inconspicuous passage that leads to an unknowable place, while the view from the boat, archaic in its depiction of a gathering climax, transforms any threat into a sublime moment between object and nature.

Memory, reality, fantasy, or archival pictures—the landscapes that comprise Victor Balanon’s And in Arcadia resist any simple categorization. Through their seemingly straightforward appearances, they carry the ambiguous nature of representation where acts of representation itself, such as cinema and photography, have also become sources where memory and experience can be derived. And like in Poussin’s Arcadia where the whole Utopian scene serves as a reminder of man’s mortality, Victor Balanon’s series also suggests a lingering death—of purging and cleansing—a transfiguration of the image into a new way of seeing.

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