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WORDS Tom Lordan cases living among the people an
d areas that his artworks depict. According to the curatorial materials, Maguire visited Brazil in April 2022, navigating his way along the Abacaxis River, travelling by boat from village to village, observing the fire-scorched, barren landscapes wrought by deforestation. He also noted the “persistent neglect” that indigenous social groups of the Amazon basin, including the Maraguá people, suffer in Brazil. This sensitivity to a wider imbalance in Brazilian society is captured in the painting, an outlier among the exhibition, titled Child Living From the Waste Food on the City Dump (São Paulo 2003), which features a lone, small silhouette among a dark wasteland. The date in this title is another clue that Maguire’s artistic concerns are borne from lifelong personal experience and longstanding habits of international collaboration: he remarks in our correspondence that he’s “had a 25 year engagement with radical social groups in Brazil;” involving a wide-range of activities, from drawing portraits of individuals murdered by the dictatorship, to visiting inmates in the infamous Carandiru Prison, to teaching children with “a Dublin-born Holy Ghost Father” called Pat Clarke “in São Paulo favelas”. Maguire’s painterly style has been described as neo-Expressionist, but don’t be misled into thinking that the artist bears a strong resemblance to abstractionists like Pollock and Rothko. Maguire’s expressionism, if that is what it is, belongs as much to the tradition of modern European expressionism, of the likes of Henri Matisse, Egon Schiele, and Vincent Van Gogh. What he does share with the American avantgarde is scale: his works are expansive, room-dominating adventures in paint; The Burning Amazon, typical of the collection, is 9 x 15 feet. And Maguire has a remarkable facility for colour and contrast, not only within a composition, but also between – this exhibition features canvases that represent stages of forest clearance, with moments of tranquillity bracketed by immolation and ruin. The verdancy of the rainforest’s bright green swatches are underscored in a contrapuntal arrangement with the yellow licking flames and sky-darkening smoke that represent its erasure. But what about the import of the show? After all, these paintings offer an explicit political critique of destructive ecological practices, and the exhibition notes assert that Maguire’s approach is “an act of solidarity,” about “rehumanising his subjects and recentring the narratives of the disenfranchised.” I should say that I am sceptical about claims that art can play a meaningful role in the events of global politics, if by “playing a meaningful role” one means “causing changes to the material circumstances” of whatever issue is at stake. Take Maguire’s The Burning Amazon: I think it’s unlikely that a painting of workers destroying the Amazon rainforest will have any impact on the decision to continue that practice. It’s not that I doubt that art plays a significant role in stimulating discussion and shaping norms through culture – of course I do. But my (fairly uncontroversial) take is that, whatever degree of influence an artwork exerts through normative channels - by inflaming people’s passions enough to speak to their peers, or to make changes in their behaviour, or to confront their politicians etc. – I don’t think that the reach of that influence is limitless: its limit is, for the most part, the nation state. What follows from this is that it’s unlikely, maybe even impossible, for a painting of deforestation in the Amazon to change the material circumstances of that situation, in the event that the painting is a) exhibited in Ireland and b) produced by an Irish painter. To be fair, the above claim is not being made. In our correspondence, Maguire writes that “art reflects society – Trotsky referred to art as society’s cracked mirror.” He continues: “The more accurate art is and indeed the more powerfully it is created then the greater contribution it makes to our understanding of society. Picasso’s Guernica is a 20th-century example of this process. In early life I made political posters and leaflets, delivered or put them up, now I just make my work – though I am very proud to have designed the Labour Poster for the Marriage Referendum.” I appreciate Maguire’s point. But is visual art the best place for understanding the world, if the aim of that understanding is to use it to make political changes? And does a greater degree of accuracy render more understanding? I remain sceptical about these ideas. I share a concern voiced by Theodor Adorno, for whom “committed art,” i.e art with a political message, was suspect: its instances “all too readily credit themselves with every noble value, and then manipulate them at their ease,” he wrote in 1974, adding that committed art “often means bleating what everyone is already saying.” This is why “autonomous art,” or modernist, experimental art, is preferable: autonomous art questions and expands the public’s understanding of self and world without didactically explaining; it offers “knowledge” by confronting us with “non-conceptual objects.” While Adorno’s assertion is overly dismissive, the rationale that underpins his account is persuasive. Nonetheless, however you understand the obligations or capacities of art in the context of international politics, nobody can deny the depth of Maguire’s engagement with issues of social justice, nor deny the aesthetic impact of his enormous, pulchritudinous artworks. As Rosa Abbott of Kerlin noted to me, Maguire’s work in The Clock Winds Down possesses “a visceral beauty.” Brian Maguire: The Clock Winds Down is in the Kerlin Gallery until April 8 49