Brian Maguire spent most of last year working on a project that was quixotic in its ambition and uncertain in its effects. Against a background of the faltering Peace Process in Northern Ireland, he entered into a series of personal negotiations that brought him into the heart of the republican and loyalist camps. What he set out to do, under the auspices of the Prison Arts Foundation, was to paint portraits of Provisional IRA, UVF and UDA prisoners in Long Kesh.
Some of the resultant images, arranged in a grid pattern and digitally printed to billboard size, can be seen as part of Inside/Out, a major exhibition of his work at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. His Northern Ireland project prompted a plethora of comments, many of them antagonistic, when some of the work was originally unveiled in Belfast, at the Ormeau Baths Gallery and on a billboard on the Shankill Road. On one level it's not difficult to see why, though it does help to view it in context in a show that is effectively a 10-year retrospective of his work. It has been an important decade for him, during which he learned to situate isolated pictorial gestures in much wider programmes of action and meaning.
In person, he is a fiery, mercurial spirit, given to wild flurries of movement punctuated by minor collapses into reflective, almost dejected stillness. He contrives to look a bit unruly even when decked out like a businessman. Somehow his innate anarchy spills over, contradicting the disguise. He is a natural rebel. Born in Bray in 1951, he instinctively bridled against authority throughout his school years, though he was interested in learning. He attended Dun Laoghaire VEC for a year as a prelude to the National College of Art and Design, where he was a notably discontented and disruptive presence. He has since commented that the NCAD's proximity to the Dail (the two buildings adjoined in Kildare St at the time) demonstrated for him the continuous ideological loop of the State's workings, a consistent theme in his work.
Early on, there is an hiatus in the chronology of his career (a word he is not much enamoured of). It was a difficult period, including a brush with desperation that is worth mentioning because of its significance in terms of what he has gone on to do since. He has acknowledged his debt to Patrick Graham in developing his voice as an artist. Not only were they friends for a long time, but over several years their work seemed to develop in tandem, in a spirit of generous, mutual support. He established himself in the 1980s under the Neo-Expressionist banner but, as with most artists who did so, it was to some extent a flag of critical convenience, and does not sum up what he is about.
He embraced representation as a means of dealing with real people in the real world. A spirit of angry engagement characterises his approach from the beginning. He is not really interested in style. His "expressionism" could even be seen as emerging from a desire to obliterate style, to arrive at a Painting Year Zero, which is not to say that his painting is inarticulate. On the contrary, his work is often conceptually layered and complex in terms of its content, but imparted with almost brutal, idiographic directness. The quiet, tender lyricism that emerges in many of his pictures is an incalculable but indispensable element, and probably derives from his good, old-fashioned humanism.
His identification with marginalised outsiders might seem romantic, but it is not. Buildings feature regularly in his work, often in the form of bleak, institutional spaces, including prisons and asylums, as well as domestic environments. These various buildings are what they are, but they are also symbolic of wider social containment. The prison is one, extreme manifestation of society's way of putting us in our place, of defining and deciding identity. His interest in outsiders lies in exploring the tensions that arise between individuals and the all-encompassing social matrix within which they exist, tensions that he has obviously experienced at first hand himself.
Means of containment take many forms. In one painting, Forever There from 1996, it is startlingly represented by an array of phalluses directed against a boxed or caged woman. There are uncomfortable paintings of individuals and couples, parents and children not quite managing to conform to the happy families stereotype. Even when they are in groups, people in Maguire's paintings are usually separated from each other, unsure of how to communicate. A sequence of anguished, isolated male figures is particularly striking, each so consummately alone and incommunicado that the sense of apartness is palpable. "It would be lonelier without the loneliness," in Denis Donoghue's memorable phrase.