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ARTSDESK PERSISTENT NEGLECT For his new body of w
ork artist Brian Maguire travelled to Brazil to investigate what war reporter Ed Vuillamy has described as “the war on the world” – the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The relationship between art, politics and activism is one of the most contentious in the field of art theory, and Brian Maguire has long provoked his audience into a state of critical and ethical reflection, by putting the question of art’s role in depicting issues of global injustice at the centre of his work. Maguire was born in Bray in 1951, and his longstanding career as a painter began in the 1980s, with solo exhibitions in the Triskel, the Wexford Arts Centre, and the Douglas Hyde. This period was preceded by a personal crisis Maguire discusses in an essay by Ed Vulliamy, published in an artist monograph in 2018. Vuillamy, widely known as a war correspondent, interviewed Maguire on several occasions, and the artist shared details about his family, his formative years, and his professional practice. He describes his experience as a young alcoholic in Belfast in poignant terms; time bleeding away, each day another “hungover write-off.” Fortunately for Maguire, he had a breakthrough moment. 48 “It was a helter-skelter of alcohol and alcoholics, through which I went to college in 1969, had a child in 1974. Then, just before Christmas in 1979, I realised: this had to stop or else you’ll die drunk, literally. I went into a program and I’ve been off it ever since - and that’s when my career began.” Growing up in Belfast in the 1960s and 70s, the artist responded to the sectarian inequalities of his environment by joining the Official Irish Republican Army, a Marxist-Leninist offshoot of the paramilitary organisation. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that in the past 40 years, Maguire has been drawn to subjects that not only elicit an aesthetic response, but a political one. Maguire’s new exhibition at Kerlin consists of a handful of large-scale acrylic paintings, grappling with the theme of ecological disaster by examining industrial deforestation in the Amazon basin; Maguire contemplates several scenes that involve the clearance of the rainforest for commercial profit. This continues a well-established tradition of exploring injustice in the global South, and in Latin America in particular. Maguire spent ten years off and on in Ciudad Juárez, a city in northern Mexico, where the artist explored the social and familial impact of a surge in femicides between 1993 and 2005. The phenomenon of “feminocidio - mass abduction, violation, mutilation, torture and murder of women” – compelled Maguire’s attention. In interviews with Vuillamy, he talks about the all-too-familiar component of this shocking story: “it figured, of course – women come below men, poor come below rich, brown comes below white, and Mexico comes below America, young below old. They don’t fucking count, and that is why they die.” This detour into Maguire’s Ciudad Juárez paintings – portraits of the murdered women – serves to highlight another notable feature of Maguire’s artistic practice, evident in The Clock Winds Down: the artist’s preference for travelling to and in some