Three distinct though related segments make up Brian Maguire's exhibition at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast. The show's descriptive title Casa Da Cultura and Prejudicial Portraits indicates only two of them, but the third is, in context, the most contentious, and has already given rise to heated discussion.
It is actually a work-in-progress, The Belfast Portrait Project, undertaken during the run of the exhibition, throughout which Maguire has been making portraits of individuals at the Longkesh/Maze Prison. That's not all there is to it, but it's the aspect that has, predictably enough, aroused the ire of some observers and, on the face of it, it's easy to see why. Why, objectors have asked, focus yet again on offenders rather than victims? The fact that the project involves a publicly funded gallery has also attracted adverse comment.
Yet to appreciate Maguire's rationale it is essential to consider the nature of his work in the long term, and the exhibition as a whole - and it is a show that merits attention, not least because it does venture into contentious areas, boldly or clumsily, according to the way we choose to interpret it.
The Belfast Portrait Project follows logically on from the bodies of earlier work that it accompanies. The earliest of these, Prejudicial Portraits is typical of the artist in representing a conjunction of work and life. From the start he has been an artist engage. Over the last decade and more, he has been closely involved with various artist residencies, workshops and educational projects in prisons in Ireland and elsewhere. The portraits are of prisoners he encountered and in many cases came to know well.
Be they of prisoners, of himself or of anyone else, it is fair to say that his paintings excel at capturing a sense of apartness in individuals. There is usually something emotionally bruised, isolated and vulnerable about the faces he depicts, though not in a mawkish, sentimental way. He approaches sitters with real openness and there is no artifice in the finished product, there's even a certain awkwardness of handling in the way vivid colours are gruffly arranged into a bold image of a face, though the effect can be unexpectedly lyrical. In terms of their emotional directness and their broad handling, it is reasonable to see Van Gogh's portraits as a model.
In his work, Maguire has consistently identified with the socially excluded in a way that goes beyond a romantic conception of the artist as outsider, because his identification is grounded partly in a political view of social structures. Each prisoner is a part and a product of a society. This is spelled out in the work he did in Brazil as Ireland's representative at the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo last year. Instead of merely drafting in work made at home in the comfort of his own studio, he was keen to make something in situ and, again, rather than making an autonomous work of art in the privileged cultural space of the Bienal, he wanted to make something that reflected the fabric of the society.
Through the Centro Cultural Vila Prudente, a remarkable project where children from one of Sao Paulo's shanty towns have classes in art and theatre, Maguire developed contacts with the children and began to make portrait drawings of them. He was, meanwhile, struck by the constant procession of photographs of convicts in the tabloid press, and he began, concurrently, to make drawings of them as well. The implied connection, between conditions of deprivation and criminality, is pretty clear.
A final chapter is added in the form of a vast, bleached-out looking painting, Memorial that occupies a whole wall of the Ormeau Baths. It is based on a news photograph of the bodies of slain convicts after the notorious suppression of a prison riot in 1992. The overall composite picture, from cradle to grave so to speak, is bleak. Just to underline it, an extract from Jonathan Swift's savagely satirical A Modest Proposal is inscribed on one wall.
There is one vital mitigating element. Maguire doesn't just use images of the children to make a political point. His drawings of them are extremely good, exceptionally direct and immediate, and he added another dimension to the portraits by giving the drawings to their subjects. They were then photographed in each child's home, and the photographs are exhibited in the form of large format colour prints. His insistence on lending depth and autonomy to his subjects, in terms of both his unmistakably warm responses to them in the drawings, and his evocation of the texture of their lives beyond his own momentary involvement, is extremely convincing. As he remarked last year in between visits to Brazil, it would be easy to fall into the trap of exploitation, and above all he wanted to avoid that.
The Brazilian work occupies the larger of the two rooms devoted to his exhibition, and it is by far the more successful of the two in that it is rich and cohesive. But once we apply what he is saying in the room with the Brazilian work to the work-in-progress in the other room, then the overall logic of what he is doing becomes clear. The Prejudicial Portraits are accompanied by an eight-minute video in which images of the paintings are shown while the Rules for the Government of Prisons Act, 1947 is recited. The juxtaposition emphasises the dehumanising effect of prison, a suppression of individuality that is characteristic of all institutions.
The Belfast Prison Project meanwhile, doesn't stop within the confines of the prison walls. Again, Maguire has worked to develop contacts, and portrait subjects, in the wider communities, in the Shankill and the Falls Road. Eventually the completed portraits, 30 to 40 in number, will become the property of their subjects and will be exhibited, in reproduction, in a gallery and communal context. Will the project accomplish anything? It's just too early to say. But with his track record Maguire has certainly earned the space and the right to try.
Brian Maguire's Casa Da Cultura and Prejudicial Portraits are at the Ormeau Baths Gallery until May 29th.
