Air de Paris opens an exhibition of works by Emma McIntyre
Installation view of Emma McIntyre: Syllables in Oleander. Photo: Gregory Copitet. Courtesy Air de Paris, Romainville | Grand Paris
PARIS.—
It’s impossible to think about Emma McIntyre’s work without thinking about all of art‘s history, and it’s impossible to think about Emma McIntyre’s work without thinking about Los Angeles.
And so, in Syllables in Oleander there it is: art history accumulated, laid bare of historical context, and filtered through the prism of L.A.’s shadowless daylight— revivified and teased out to excite anew.
“Theater is the negation of art”1 writes Michael Fried derisively from 1967. So be it, McIntyre and Los Angeles respond in unison from 2025, distilling and amplifying the artifice out of AbEx‘s gospel to resuscitate its corpse into a presence completely of its own time—a history-less, frontier abstraction rising up from a sun-burnt, jacaranda-tinted coastal mirage. The musty old canvas becomes a stage, populated with myriad characters, busy with action. In Los Angeles, says the poet Stephen Yenser, in place of sun-sets,
“the set is sunning—stunning,
Even, in ever acuter, gentler rays that with the smaze
Turn the horizon Technicolor pinks and blues, lavenders and zincs.”2
Wryly echoing Rococo’s proscenium schema favored by Watteau and Fragonard, efflorescent wings of ornament enframe the compositions’ empty Center Stage. McIntyre mounts a set, and populates it with an overflowing polyphony of proliferating references. From Sigmar Polke come the wallpaper and the pattern. From Cy Twombly, the swans and the curlicues of scribbles: the painting of writing, returning the linguistic back to the symbolic.
Says Roland Barthes—he is McIntyre’s literary reference of choice for the months of the show’s making—with a nod to Twombly: «Whether we deal with canvas, paper or wall, we deal with a stage where something is happening. So that we must take a painting as a kind of traditional stage: a curtain rises, we look, we wait, we receive, we understand; and once the scene is finished and the painting removed, we remember: we are no longer what we were: as in ancient drama, we have been initiated.»3
In Fray me like silk, as the painting’s background pours of glacial blue, burnt ocher, and dark mulberry purple arrange themselves horizontally, the stagecraft action takes place—continues taking place into perpetuity—on top of its striations, the slender white line of an elongated paint splatter bouncing, jutting, and swiveling to orient the surface towards the eye’s vertical stance.
In Blue chance and Tell it slant, The Nabis—Vuillard and Ranson, Denis and Serusier— with their penchant for a touch of Japonisme, deliver the backdrop scenery of an Orientalist lily pond. Twombly’s swans are floating stage left.
With The Swan, the Archer, the Scorpion, a theater of art history of McIntyre’s scenography, the whole backdrop is slowly oxidizing into L.A.’s present continuous post-apocalyptic—both symbolically and literally, for today’s life prefers the literal to the symbolic. As in Polke’s erstwhile experiments with oxidation, the work’s Patina paint’s chemical reaction will continue transforming the canvas’ surface throughout the show’s duration, and well beyond—the future, it suggests, is uncertain, even as the stage is always set oh-so-perfectly.
In the smaller pieces, a catalog of painting’s innermost insecurities comes to commingle all at once. Elegantly stuck between chaos and diagram, coloristic harmony and befouled gray, the works flicker in bands and bursts of dense colorways, then disappear, then reappear again behind washes of overlapping pigment—a pictorial harmony at war with itself, continuously stuck in a cyclical war between suspension and animation, revelation and obfuscation. In these strata of abstract painterly gesture, a catalog of techniques: layers of art history peeking through each other on the shared surface. One steps back, and cue the suspense music: for the tableaux are under attack by Freddy Krueger! These glove-like sunburst patterns, composed of rake-scraped furrow strippings of the top painting coat, reveal the ones below in a brazen refusal of stylistic consistency. In the drama of surface action that is abstract painting, apophenia is forever but a suggestion away, nowhere more than in a city that has always viewed cultural debris as raw material.
Barthes again: “The truth of things is best read in refuse. It is in a smear that we find the truth of redness; it is in a wobbly line that we find the truth of pencil. Ideas are not metallic and shiny Figures, in conceptual corsets”4. In Heaven or the Abyss, the sum of all the show’s other parts, a swarm-like pattern of bubble wrap’s slackened plastic’s gridded imprint blossoms inwardly into a garden of tiny flowers—a rococo theatrical set that wouldn’t let the eye rest. On top, the splashing, splattering action of the paint happens in a continuum, the Technicolor saturation of its elegantly bold palette harmonizing in a performance that could only belong to the pinks and blues of L.A.’s light palette—and there it is, time and place be damned, coruscating under the Parisian skies and into years and locations unknown—all of art’s history, remade in McIntyre’s image.
— Valerie Mindlin
Born in 1990 in Auckland, New Zealand. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Emma McIntyre creates vivid abstractions imbued with chromatic and gestural energy. Instinctual yet deeply considered, her canvases explore painting’s material and alchemical possibilities. Employing oils and unconventional substances, she pairs chance-based, intuitive processes with a repertoire of motifs and compositional strategies gleaned from a close study of art history—reformulating these divergent threads into a fresh and unbridled mode of painting that is uniquely her own.
Recent solo exhibitions of McIntyre’s work include Among my Swan, David Zwirner, Hong Kong (2025); Objects or Vapours, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand (2024); An Echo, A Stain, David Zwirner, New York (2023); Pearl Diver, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2023); Madonna of the Pomegranate, Coastal Signs, Auckland (2022); Up bubbles her amorous breath, Air de Paris, Romainville (2022); and Heat, Mossman Gallery, Wellington (2020). In 2023, paintings by the artist were included in L’Almanach 23, the fourth edition of the biennial held at Le Consortium, Dijon, France. McIntyre’s work is in the permanent collection of the Long Museum, Shanghai, and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
1 Fried, Michael, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1998, p. 148-172, p. 153, p.163
2 Yenser, Stephen, Blue Guide, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 2006, p.10
3 Twombly, Cy, Barthes, Roland, Bastian, Heiner, and White, David, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings: 1954–1977, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 1977, p. 54-77, p. 54
4 Ibid, p. 57
