Emma McIntyre: Syllables in Oleander

In “Syllables in Oleander”, Emma McIntyre reimagines the history of painting through the prism of Los Angeles light and atmosphere. Layers of references—from Abstract Expressionism to Rococo theatre, from Polke to Twombly—collide with the visual textures of the Californian landscape, producing surfaces at once theatrical, lyrical, and unstable. The canvas becomes a stage where painterly gestures act out dramas of suspension, revelation, and erasure.

McIntyre destabilises abstraction’s grand narratives, inserting fragments of art history, ornamental flourishes, and restless surface effects that expose the medium’s contradictions. Her work treats painting as scenography: a site where history, fantasy, and contemporary culture intersect and dissolve. The tension between harmony and dissonance, order and disruption, plays out across every composition, refusing stylistic consistency in favour of excess, theatricality, and multiplicity.

Her practice acknowledges painting’s inheritance while simultaneously dismantling it, filtering its traditions through the cultural debris of Los Angeles—a city where the symbolic and the literal blur. In this setting, abstraction becomes both performance and critique, continually remaking itself through surfaces that shimmer with the paradoxes of history, place, and perception.