Faces of the Favelas

The Sao Paulo Bienal, South America's equivalent of the Venice Biennale, opens next Saturday. Over 60 countries will participate, and Ireland's representative will be the painter Brian Maguire. When he travelled to Brazil earlier in the year to work on the project that will form his exhibition, he found he had his work cut out for him. It's one thing to win the honour of representing your country, it's quite another to cope with the practical and other difficulties that entails.

Participating artists, for one thing, had to work closely with an appointed curator. Not altogether unfairly, the various biennials and other high profile international exhibitions have acquired the reputation of being curatorial ego trips. It's easy to see why. The curators often see them as opportunities to make big statements - that is, big curatorial statements. At worst, this results in megalomaniacal swaggering. Sao Paulo is a curatorial jamboree. Apart from overall curator Paulo Herkenhoff, there is a veritable army of them involved, each, presumably, with a statement to make. So it's a two-tier event, a curators' show overlaying an artists' show. The guiding themes of the Bienal, to be interpreted by the curators, are Density and Anthropophagy, "density" referring to something like cultural texture, "anthropophagy" meaning cannibalism, literally and figuratively.

It could well be that the Sao Paulo curators are models of sweetness and light but, in the initial planning stages of the exhibition there was, it seems fair to say, a certain wariness on their part about Maguire. There was nothing personal about this. It is understandable in terms of the general climate of the international art world. Maguire built his reputation in Ireland as an expressionist painter. That tag is a simplistic description of what he does, but the fact remains that he is known chiefly as a painter of emotionally charged figurative pictures. That is, to put it mildly, not a fashionable thing to be in an international context. All the more remarkable then, that Maguire has not only gained widespread approval for his exceptionally ambitious exhibition of drawing, painting and photography in Sao Paulo, but also that one of his works will feature on the cover of the event's main catalogue.

How did he do it? To understand that requires a little knowledge of his work and his character. He is an exceptional individual. Headstrong and energetic, he seems to live on the edge of chaos, often courting disaster in pursuit of quixotically ambitious artistic aims. He instinctively identifies with outsiders and marginalised figures. If you follow his work over a period of years or get to know him personally, you soon realise that this is not an affectation, a pose. The strength of what he does derives largely from his total commitment. His approach in Sao Paulo is typical. There are three main strands to his show. He once remarked that he would like to paint nice pictures of flowers, but other things kept getting in the way. Having arrived in the city, he found that reality beyond the confines of the Bienal's art world tended to get in the way. He felt he wanted to establish contact with that other reality.

Through an Irish Holy Ghost priest, Pat Clark, he learned of the work of the Centro Cultural Vila Prudente, a small educational project where three people give lessons in art and theatre to children from the shanty towns, the "favelas". He spent time there and started to make portrait drawings of the children. He is acutely conscious of the delicacy of invading the lives of individuals in such environments.

"It's a very sensitive situation," he says. "You wouldn't want to think you're doing them a favour, you know?" He said between visits to Sao Paulo. "Bestowing your friendship on them just because, for example, they're poor and you're not. It comes down to two people communicating. They might resent you, and quite rightly. They might hate your guts. That's their privilege. I'm always aware of that." He brought photographs of the portrait drawings back to Ireland. They are straightforward, honest attempts at likenesses. His openness to his subjects comes across in them. He gave the drawings to the children they depict. With their agreement, he visited their homes and photographed the drawings in situ. Some of the drawings, and these photographs, will be displayed at the Bienal.

He had already started making another series of portrait drawings, in charcoal and wash. "While I was there, I was given a space to work, a room. First thing every day I'd look at a newspaper. I noticed that all the time one particular tabloid printed mug shots of people convicted of various crimes and sent to prison. And there was this sense of sameness about the mug shots, all printed in this uniform format, together with their crimes and their sentences. But I began to wonder about them individually."

So he started to make drawings from the mug shots, as a way of restoring individuality and character to people who had become mere ciphers, identified only in terms of their crimes and sentences. This followed on from his experience of teaching art in prisons in Ireland. The two sets of portraits are, Thomas McEvilley points out in the catalogue, "pictures of different stages of life."

The implication that they are like snapshots of different stages of the same inexorable process is unstated but inescapable. There is a rather grim final act. A big, almost monochrome diptych, Memorial, is based on photographs of dead convicts laid out in coffins following a 1992 prison massacre, when over 100 men were shot down by police. What makes all this work effective is its directness, its lack of artifice, even its humility. While Maguire is Ireland's official representative at Sao Paulo, there are two other artists from Ireland there as well. Maurice O'Connell and Nigel Rolfe arrived via the selection process, scouted by the show's curators. O'Connell's work has more and more moved towards direct contact with an audience - is even shaped by that moment of contact. Rolfe is showing a video, Hand on Face, relating to black and white power in South Africa.

The XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo runs from October 3rd to December 15th, 1998.