Brian Maguire (1951) is a militant artist. He roams the world, focusing on disenfranchised and marginalised men and women, the victims of global capitalism, deadly wars and trafficking. His political awareness finds its origins in the civil rights movement in which he took part in Northern Ireland. For him, painting is an act of solidarity, the fruit of a practice that consists of “meeting, questioning, listening, understanding and passing on the story”. [1]
His painting is figurative and since the early 1970s has borne the struggles of those he sets out to meet in the United States (Arizona), Mexico (Nature Morte Series), or Syria (Aleppo Paintings). Also initiating numerous interactive projects, his practice is inseparable from the connections he has woven over the years with the communities that he supports.
His methods of enquiry are journalistic. For the series Arizona, for instance, he undertook research into the annual deaths of the migrants from Central America in the deserts around Tucson. He created a series of paintings based on photographs taken by law enforcement, selected from among five hundred archive images, to which he gained access, thanks to the help of the head doctor of Pima County.
His Mexican Paintings reveal the violence perpetrated in the Mexican city of Juárez. Situated on the border between the United States in the south of El Paso, Texas, it was deemed the most murderous city in the world for three consecutive years between 2008 and 2010. Brian Maguire painted these portraits in response to the feminicide and disappearance of hundreds of young women in the city since 1993. This work led him to move to Juárez, working out of the newsroom of El Norte newspaper to investigate the public and often ritual exhibition of the victims. He is now attempting to show the extent to which this violence is associated with the global drugs trade.
In 2017 Brian Maguire also travelled to Syria. He denounces the refugee crisis and the dramas that send the shores of European coastlines into mourning each year. His Aleppo Paintings represent the ruins of gutted buildings in the city and attest to disasters of war.
But Brian Maguire is not a war reporter: he paints. What first captivates our gaze is the serene power of his painting.
The painter subtly plays on the contrast between painterly fluidity, the seduction of texture, and the brutality of the subjects he presents. From pleasure to fear, exaltation to disgust, the viewers’ emotional state – and thus their awareness – intensifies. A terrible beauty, a delightful horror that nevertheless refuses to aestheticize or sensationalize. There are no shocking images here. Diluted into very large formats, acrylic painting technique slowly brings out the subject figured in the painting. There is nothing garish, no scandal. The painting gives us time to see – further evidence of the artist’s generosity. It progressively reveals the image, to the full measure of its atrocity.
With the artistic and sensitive means inherent to them, and through the authority of the pictorial genre, Brian Maguire restores the memory and dignity of the victims left out of official accounts. His monumental paintings and portraits thus continue the tradition of historical painting. They dialogue with Francisco de Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Édouard Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian and, today, with the canvases of Yan Pei-Ming or Marlene Dumas.
[1] Jonathan Cummins, ‘J’accuse: Brian Maguire’ (press release), VOID Gallery, Londonderry, Ireland, from 28 November 2015 to 6 February 2016.
