An almost believable view … Jules de Balincourt's High and Low, Photograph: Jules de Balincourt/Victoria Miro Gallery  The day has a holiday air. People are out on their rooftops or standing about on patches of green. I can't tell what time of day it is – let's say the afternoon – or the season; the soft sunlight and hazy distance, where unending buildings rise in the thickening sky, make me think of late summer or early autumn. That was the time of year the painting was finished, so maybe something of the world crept into the Brooklyn studio where Jules de Balincourt painted High and Low, completing the large group of paintings now at Victoria Miro Gallery.  High and Low is filled with the kind of modern, aspirational shoebox architecture you find everywhere; a ubiquitous banality hemming diminutive bits of 19th-century Greek revival – a stray townhouse and a distant set of steps that seem to lead nowhere. Here and there the cityscape gets fudged. It is a world unfinished, or about to give up on itself. At points the perspective goes astray, the buildings warping out of alignment. Some of the figures don't seem quite solid, either, or have forgotten to bring their shadows with them. At one point, the sky abandons its pretence, and you can see the whirls and knots of the plywood panel on which it was painted. It is like The Truman Show.  This is something we often care not to remember when we look at a painting. We know the birds are just ticks of paint and the world is just smears and blobs on a sheet of board, or a bit of cloth stretched over a frame and fastened there with cheap industrial staples or a row of carpet tacks. You'd be an idiot not to acknowledge the something and nothing that is a painting, but even more of a fool to reduce it to bare material fact. The world is always about to fall apart, and us with it, so it's best to acknowledge the happenstance miracle of being alive.  Perhaps that is what is happening here, in this almost believable view, where people have gathered, going about their day or ranged on the rooftops in watery light, looking at something we can't fathom. Maybe everyone is waiting for something to happen. They seem to be looking towards the small park, but there isn't much going on down there. There's a very big statue of a man with a cane, dwarfing the strollers, and what seems to be a picnic. Kids play, couples walk. We are either too early or too late, which leaves us free to let our eyes wander.  High and Low would make a good jigsaw or drawing for a New Yorker cover. It's the sort of painting you can project yourself into, losing yourself in this painted day. This is an unsophisticated sort of pleasure, but one I never wholly tire of. Children like to lose themselves in pictures like this. You imagine the lives people live there, and get distracted as you look. You could call it escapism but you always re-find yourself inside the labyrinth of looking, thinking and daydreaming. Looking is a beginning as much as an end in itself.  All these windows in all these buildings remind me of a nativity calendar. Each one is itself like a little painting. Some show us the corner of a room, the ones further away as abstract as a Kazimir Malevich work. Oddly, the little dun-coloured interior views in the nearer buildings remind me of some early paintings by Luc Tuymans. Nothing much happens in them, either.  These fragmentary internal views incite our curiosity and voyeurism. I stay on the lookout for someone dressing or having a row or pressed up against the window having a bit of wild sex, as they do in Steve McQueen's film Shame. But they don't, or I haven't found them yet. They'd just be blobs anyway. I feel like Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, or Gene Hackman in Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 thriller The Conversation. Looking becomes bugging, a kind of god-like act of surveillance. The more you look, the more there is to see, but the anomalies of this world become even more insistent, as if the fiction can't sustain itself. The unreliable narrator becomes the unreliable painter.  Jules de Balincourt's paintings are not very consistent. There are big ones and little ones, crowded ones and empty ones, paintings filled with figures and others that appear almost entirely abstract. Sometimes he paints explosions, but they're sort of benign and cartoonish, opening like jazzy flowers. He paints views and people and maps and words, pretty much always on birch panels using thin oils. There's one piece showing a man sticking something in a bin; and there's a cursory portrait of Chelsea Manning, hung high on the wall, as though removed from the rest of the world.  But most paintings have groups of people in them, some seen close up, others far away: people sitting in a tree, people watching, sleeping or sitting around in the shade. Every painting has its own atmosphere, its own timbre. There are all degrees of depiction, just as there are different flaws, fault lines and blind spots. Things that have been painted out grin through the layers, like the smile of the Cheshire cat.  Often de Balincourt starts in one place and ends in another, working on a large number of paintings at once. He doesn't draw and he rarely uses photographs or other source material. Ideas migrate from painting to painting, as if he were telling himself a story. He likes to let things fall apart, and to let the half-said or the inarticulate have their stumbling say. Viewing his work is like stumbling on the kerb or catching a snatch of half-heard conversation. Somehow, these moments make his paintings more believable, less smooth, carrying more of the texture of the day. It wouldn't work in any other medium.
The French artist's absorbing canvases create whole worlds, embrace the miracle of being alive – and leave you feeling like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, writes Adrian Searle