Emma McIntyre at Air de Paris

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Amazing how far we've come. 10 years ago Josh Smith was ironically fucking himself on canvas, Joe Bradley's neanderthal nappies were thought the bedrock of low, stoopid fun. Kerstin Brätsch's fake import/export DAS INSTITÜT. But the ironizing of the sign only serves the delivery of what we really wanted: big juice, canvas, double gulp size. Irony allowed for cake and its excuse too: this was sugar free painting, a critique or whatever. But "the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier." And eventually someone realized they didn't need a delivery vehicle for cake. And so now today here have it, full blown painting Tang.

Emma McIntyre at Chris Sharp Gallery

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The lead at the eponymous, opening with, questions abound, is this an argument/ante/gambit for unambiguously pretty painting? Bogs of the saccharine, positively. Don't sleep on this.

The PR's first paragraph is more classical- appends only minor conceptual hedging: "lyrical recapitulations of the history of abstraction" (lyrical) or the more time honored "historical engagement." These are negligible clauses compared to our decades long cliche, of painters "investigating painting" "rehistoricizing painting" "avoiding-at-all-costs-saying-just-painting." And this PR uses no ironizing verb. Instead the second paragraph spends its juice, arguing "lack of allegiance" "refusal to be limited," "languages to be liberally borrowed from." Until finally, "her articulate frank and unfettered incidents of a body thinking on canvas" which translates almost perfectly to "just painting." In a Merleau-Ponty sorta way. Drips that aren't even ironic. This would all seem slight, so inconsequential, if it didn't feel like an opening readied for crowbars edge. The last line earns its dystopian threat, the window wrested open to the "new horizons in contemporary abstract painting." It may come flooding. An ocean blue strategy eventually coalesces an ocean red with.

See too: Joanne Greenbaum, Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen, Tyler Vlahovich at Lulu and Marc Selwyn