“Stuck in symbol purgatory, halfway between meaning everything and meaning nothing, a painted flower can be abundant or deadweight. It’s a contradiction straight out of Fragonard: while Rococo corkscrewed between joyful and silly, the hindsight of the French Revolution lends the movement’s 'aristocratic dream-world' a danse macabre quality.”
Photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Brimming with chromatic and gestural energy, Emma McIntyre’s Epitaph for Fire and Flower is imbued with the ebullient spirit that has come to define the rising artist’s painted surfaces of chance and chaos. Painted in 2023, Epitaph for Fire and Flower takes its title from renowned poet Sylvia Plath’s 1957 work of the same name. Plath’s fiery and flashing text that speaks to the fleeting nature of love and beauty – a flame on the precipice of burning out – takes visual form in McIntyre’s utterly mesmerising ruminations. Here, lyrical brushstrokes sweep across the canvas with gentle dynamism against dripping veils of paint and loosely rendered flowers. In a visual cacophony of blush pinks, chartreuse and lilac, Epitaph for Fire and Flower embodies McIntyre’s pursuit for instinctive and experimental mark-making.
Hailing from Auckland, New Zealand (Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa), it was McIntyre’s move to Los Angeles in 2019 for an MFA at the Art Center College of Design that granted her newfound creative freedom. In this new setting, McIntyre’s artistic references underwent a period of drastic expansion, allowing her singular visual lexicon to be moulded by wide-ranging influences. From the decorative painters of the Rococo period to the writings of literary figures such as Audre Lorde, McIntyre’s penchant for historical dialogue can be clearly discerned in the present work with Florine Stettheimer’s painting Family Portrait II from 1933, housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The three crimson flowers emblazoned across the lower half of Epitaph for Fire and Flower draw inspiration from multifarious sources: Plath’s namesake poem, the frenzied floral ornamentation of Rococo, Mary Cassatt’s painted flowers, and not least, Stettheimer’s painting that had “infected [her] mind,” with its commanding floral bouquet that altogether dominates the composition (Evangeline Riddiford Graham, “Emma McIntyre: Big Crafty Angels in the Garden,” Art News Aotearoa, issue 199, 25 September 2023, p. 61).
"I use history as a springboard. I may be a magpie, but I'm not an appropriationist. I learn things about painting that I can apply to my own practice. It's often just about formal or compositional decisions—like whether I need a certain shape or not—but it can also be about wanting my work to push towards an idea of a landscape, or an organic space."
As with all of McIntyre’s work, Epitaph for Fire and Flower is driven by a desire to embrace the decorative, in both her mark-making and motifs. Having observed a fear of the decorative in much of contemporary painting, McIntyre instead pursues its possibilities. The present work directly references iconic paintings from the Rococo period, including Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Embarkation to Cythera from 1717. Filled with exceptionally theatrical drama, Watteau painted crowds of figures and motifs against a dramatic backdrop much like a stage. In using theatre as a rupture point, Watteau removed his image from our immediate reality into an imagined realm that McIntyre’s Epitaph for Fire and Flower similarly exists within. Heavily layered with shades of vivid pinks and petal tones, the present work is resplendent in its sea of visual ornament and chromatic depth.
"I like the floral form and it's so ubiquitous throughout art history that I don't think it has to mean too much. It's just a placeholder for some other kind of representational form."
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nt to McIntyre’s rising importance, since 2023 she has exhibited internationally in New York, Paris, and Hong Kong, marking her emergence onto the global stage. Epitaph for Fire and Flower is at once a site of ornamentation and its necessary counterpoint, where fullness yields to pause and exuberance to restraint. With its theatrical play of oppositions, the work crystallises McIntyre’s singular vision – to continually challenge the bounds of painting’s history.