OK. The press release for this exhibition at London’s CNB Gallery goes as such: ‘the show explores romantic notions of the end of the sun’. Let’s think about that … romantic? You know what happens when the sun ends, right? Yes, we slowly freeze to death whilst all around us shrivels away. Romantic, hey?

Still, Ally McIntyre’s arresting paintings — dripping in iconography — are sun-stoppingly lovely; and what use is all that fucking sunlight anyway? Which delivereth your narrator to another cold truth: press releases rarely do art justice. I’m not leading a witch-hunt for whoever put the press materials together, far from, instead lauding the creativity and gusto of artists whose art takes control of they.

In The Sun Popped, Canadian painter Ally McIntyre has let her brush do the talking; toying with mythology, symbols of worship, and overtones of feminist activism, and conjuring up something altogether more … unspeakable. Work that bellows great overtures of visual noise, work that taunts, provokes, grips its subjects.

‘Experiencing Ally’s paintings,’ begins CNB Gallery director Rebecca Lidert, ‘you understand what a confident painter she is. Her work is empowering. Her visual language has the conviction of a well accomplished artist. Her use of colour and composition are unusual, unique and bold.’ Indeed, McIntyre’s work belies the experience of an artist who graduated in the glory of a HIX Award just last year, it is confident and bold, and unusual and unique, it is the sort of thing you’d expect from that accomplished artist. The sun. Popping? Might not be that bad, after all.

Ally McIntyre, The Sun Popped, continues at CNB Gallery, London, until 10 July

@cnbgallery

Rosebud, 2016
Acrylic on raw canvas, 160 cm x 120 cm
© Ally McIntyre. Courtesy the artist and CNB Gallery

Reclining Eclipse, 2016
Acrylic, spray paint on raw canvas, 185 cm x 170 cm
© Ally McIntyre. Courtesy the artist and CNB Gallery