Balula addresses the painterly representation of landscape: images of riverbeds, including those of the East River and the Seine, made by throwing a large piece of canvas, filled with pebbles and tied with a rope, into the waterways. After leaving the canvas submerged for about two hours, he pulls it back to shore, creating a visual record in water stains, algae and mud. Expanses of untreated canvas, the final works, East River Painting (2009), La Seine Painting (2010), and Douro Painting (2010), feature green or black smudges (depending on the health of the river), accumulations of silt and the occasional leaf of an underwater plant—poetic compositions shaped by Balula's plunge into the natural environment.

Balula is concerned with temperature, and materials that change over time. He mentioned Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana—recalling the latter's assault on the monochromatic picture plane—as references in the creation of the carbonized surface. Working with deliberate, arbitrary constraints, he opens his constructions to nature and chance.