Most of us take respect for our human rights for granted, but unfortunately, human rights abuses have been proliferating and not only in far too many wars across the world. It is therefore particularly timely to explore the work of the Irish painter Brian Maguire, who has dedicated his life to exposing human tragedies, focusing on the marginalised and often ignored in society. He makes the invisible visible and gives them a voice. His work can be seen as a painterly declaration of the illusion of human rights.
Brian Maguire’s La Grande Illusion, hosted by the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, pulls no punches. I’ll start with a painting that is easy on the eye, but after that, all changes. Read on only if you want to see the truth of our times. Trigger warning: at least one of the paintings is hard to look at.
Maguire’s painting below almost feels like a beachscape. There is a beautiful blue. A man stands contemplating the water. We don’t know why or what he is searching for. Maybe he is just enjoying a refreshing break, admiring the expanse of blue. But this painting is Brian Maguire inviting us into his big illusion. Enjoy it. Then read the title – Over Our Heads the Hollow Oceans Closed Up. Ominous words heralding what is to come in the exhibition.
The hollow oceans and seas have too often been filled with the shipwrecked, with lost migrants. Some make it. Far too many don’t. We all remember the two-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, washed up on shore on 21 December 2015, a tragic victim of a failed attempt to escape the civil war and reach Europe (the Italian artist Jago sculpted Figlio Velato to help us never forget the tragedy). Brian Maguire, in his series Remains, presents us with another vision and memory of loss – of those lost migrating from Mexico to the US, washed up, broken, not on Mediterranean beaches but on the parched desert sands of Arizona. He cannot cover every tragedy individually, so he “looks for a single image that tells the whole story” (see his video, on Remains).
The Syrian civil war has been a civilisational tragedy. Aleppo should be a city known and heralded for its history – it has been a centre of civilisation for around eight thousand years. But it is now not known for housing the Amorite people, nor as an ancient trading city between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, as the centre of worship of the Storm-God by the Hittites, nor as an important part of the Ottoman Empire, its third biggest city. It is known for its destruction and the misery of the Syrian Civil War. Brian Maguire captures the loss of life in the grey, burst-open, broken buildings. The paint turns to rivulets of colourless blood in the lower part of the painting. War. Power. Destruction. We’ve all seen far too many similar press photos from Gaza and Ukraine.
Brian Maguire also explores the impacts of gang warfare and the tragedy of murdered women (the “feminicidio”). We are all used to the classical art of Perseus holding Medusa’s head (notably Cellini’s famous statue in Florence), or Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, and treat them as literature or art to be marvelled at. Modern-day beheadings are no acts of literary creation or for artistic pleasure, but barbaric, heinous crimes that profoundly revolt. Skip the next painting if you wish. I didn’t select Maguire’s painting of the head on its own, as it was even more disturbing.
The destruction of the environment also features in Maguire’s outrage in paint. Below, in Burning Amazon (2023) and Clearcut Amazon (2023), he depicts the destruction of the Amazon, arguably the crown jewel of global biodiversity. In Burning Amazon, we see soot, charred trunks and blood-red fire. No trees are left. No green. None of the amazing species. Just our burning civilisational footprint. In Clearcut Amazon, where are the deep green canopies humming with life? All I see is a huge gash scarred right across the landscape to the horizon. An open wound. Much of the destruction is by illegal loggers, criminals not only against nature but also brutal in their suppression of truth. There have been beheadings of environmental defenders trying to document unlawful practices, as horrifically exemplified in Juan Bautista Silva and his son, Juan Antonio Hernández’s macabre death in Honduras. Beheaded and dismembered by chainsaw. They are not the only environmental defenders murdered, silencing the truth. Globally, more than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed between 2012 and 2023.
One act I had, until recently, thought firmly relegated to an unforgivable chapter of European history – the nazi salute – returns as a warning of modern fascist tendencies in Maguire’s Police Graduation (Juárez). Unfortunately, the image, with the black boots and the bodies leached of humanity’s colour, resonates beyond the tragic European past. Where has civilizational memory gone? Will the meaning leech out of the emphatic phrase- Never Again!?
With all this pain, fear and hate, it is best to end with hope. Below is a picture of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A commitment by all leaders to respect and enforce these would lead to lesser inspiration for painters like Ireland’s Brian Macquire, Italy’s Jago, South Africa’s William Kentridge, or the many other courageous artists painting the world as it is, so that we may not ignore the warnings.
Brian Maguire’s exhibition in Dublin, La Grande Illusion, an important but harrowing declaration on the illusion of human rights, has been extended to the 18th of May. See also his work virtually at the Kerlin Gallery site, and Iverna, which spotlights Irish art and has a great virtual exhibition on the impressively courageous Brian Maguire, who actively visits and engages with those communities affected (South Sudan; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples in the USA, Arizona (for those lost in the border crossings), Mexico, Brazil, Syria). His art is definitely not art for art’s sake. But a rallying call to build a better future.
