I Go Where There Is Death
“I go where there is death” was the stark response I received to my question.
While it was wasn’t an answer to the question I had asked, it did reveal the fundamental impetus behind Brian Maguire’s art. Once, the chaos and violence of The Troubles in Maguire’s native Ireland had provided impetus for his art, now the artist from the Ulster borderlands travels further afield to the peripheral places of human decency to bear witness to the desperation and horror ignored by the denizens of Western World comfort
Maguire is driven by the need to tell the story of the unaccounted deaths of the powerless, where teenage women disappear in Juárez and governing powers simply shrug at the loss of those considered irrelevant. He transforms the awful truth of crime scene photos of butchered bodies passed to him by troubled Mexican investigators who are often impeded by faceless power in their efforts to deliver justice. These photos are so disturbing, that giant media companies refuse to publish, least they disturb their delicate readership. Somehow Maguire’s paintings of this savagery pass a threshold of acceptability and tell slaughter’s story in a way that penetrates the protected salons of the West under the guise of art
Recently Maguire visited New York for the exhibit of his Aleppo cycle at the United Nations Headquarters. He spoke at the American Irish Historical Society telling the stories behind his work of the last decade. At the Fergus
McCaffrey gallery beneath one of his giant canvases depicting the urban destruction of Aleppo, he recounted his journeys to places where most fear to travel. He told of the power of art in gaining the trust of those victimized by the cruelty of the powerful. He has been humbled by the kindness of those traumatized by brutality and is gladdened by the opportunity to salve some pain by depicting the stories of lost family members.
The work that Maguire produces is difficult and emotionally challenging but it fulfills art’s most important purpose in calling the viewer to see and contemplate truth. Maguire’s Aleppo cycle titled “War Changes It’s Address” depicts an urban landscape of devastated buildings where the gaping wounds of bisected apartments reveal the modest interior life of a people who have fled the carnage wrought by Russian-Syrian bombing. Maguire renders the uninhabited streetscapes in a muted palette consistent with a city coated with concrete dust pulverized by warfare. In one particularly arresting image, he depicts a corpse-like building, it’s floors sagging, dripping twisted rebar, an above ground archaeological site; testimony to a place once vital, now an empty echo of war’s madness.
The soft spoken Maguire leaves listeners, with a sense of gentle kindness and barely contained fury. I asked him, given the difficulty of his subject matter, whether there was joy in the creation. Without hesitation he replied in the affirmative although acknowledging that sometimes he has to allow a passage of time before engaging a subject. I expect that pause gives a space to strip down his ideas so that his work distills the essence of his experience.
Brian Maguire is that most important of artists. He is a truth teller, a bearer of witness, a mirror holder and at his core, a humble man whose vision demands viewers to acknowledge the pain visited on their fellow beings in the limnal places that the cruel would have us ignore and forget. His art calls on us to do better
With thanks to Michael Higgins of NYU’s Center on International Cooperation and the author and actor Karl Geary who respectively compèred events at American Irish Historical Society and Fergus McCaffrey Gallery
