Emma McIntyre

L'Almanach 23 : Emma McIntyre

Born in 1990 (Tamaki Makaurau, NZ). Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. 

Acknowledgements: Air de Paris, Romainville.

Abstract in orientation, McIntyre’s paintings offer themselves to the viewer as the products of processes that draw upon alchemy, wherein each successive coat of paint transforms the one beneath, culminating in upper coats that mimic the style of action painting. Steeped in the history of artistic abstraction, McIntyre’s work emphasizes sensuality and tends towards eroticism.
"An ongoing question: how far from viscera and flesh can a painting get while still being about sensuality and desire? Let lust be understood as the experience of senses bound to a surface. Take it all in with your body. Crave a source of maximum sensory information. […] Put things in motion; gushing like the foaming waters of Fragonard, and his putti’s tumbling plump peachy bodies. Make paintings that gush with too much everything. In motion, like Baudelaire’s sea journey past Cythera, in search of a lush island orgy overlooked by Venus, finding instead only a rocky barren island with bloodied flesh hanging from the gallows. For in the end, our painting projections pertain to rock, to dirt, to the deeply material reality of the substance. Be seduced. Find your moments of sublimity and then feel your way back to the earthen reality of it all. More alchemy, more surprises."
The artist has produced a series of new paintings for "L’Almanach 23".

— Éric Troncy