Emma McIntyre, We will invent new roses (2023), via Chateau Shatto
On this month in Los Angeles, local favorite Château Shatto presents a body of new paintings by Emma McIntyre, unified under the title Pearl Diver and marking the first show for the artist at the space. Embracing a gestural and expressive mode of mark-making, the works here see the artist running through a range of approaches and techniques, each time exploring notions of density, movement and space.
Emma McIntyre, who looks on the light of the sun (2022), via Chateau Shatto
McIntyre’s paintings form aesthetically exploratory mental views through gestural compilation, wherein the desirous occupations of the mind and residues of memory causally interact with physical states. Unfastened from representation yet still of-the-world, McIntyre’s paintings solicit the restlessness of the eye, get stuck in the stickiness of phenomena, and tug at the paradox of stillness in painting. Works alternate between dense pools of color, runs of paint and sticky, spilt material that belies almost alchemical approaches to the canvas. What happens at each orientation is connected through a shared expression of spillage: chemical spill, affective overflow, an abundance of phenomenal substance that spills onto the surface, excess arising from relating the mind to the world, capsized interiority finding its match in medium. Brush lines connect with the edges of pooled paint, then bounce back into their own dimension in a back-and-forth that intensifies both. Iron oxide manifests its edge as linework as rust settles into a formation that will never truly settle. The seductive potential in McIntyre’s work is often skewered by moments of jagged impulse and affrontive annotation; a wrist provoked to tie lascivious knots across the surface or silhouettes of camellia sewn out of veins of blue paint.
Emma McIntyre, Epitaph for fire and flower (2023), via Chateau Shatto
In other works, McIntyre turns towards the lyrical and gestural, with thin veins of paint and gentle gradients creating a more elegant and expressive materiality that seems to offer a microcosm for the show at a whole. With the artist moving between these light, vivid colors and dense pools of color and brushstroke, the show emphasizes McIntrye’s approach towards space and gesture.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Emma McIntyre at Chateau Shatto [Exhibition Site]
