The art of making faces

For the Celts, the head was the magic box that held the spirit prisoner. Partly inspired by this idea, one of the most celebrated contemporary Irish artists, Louis le Brocquy, made many series of head images, "imaginative reconstructions" of creative individuals past and present. These works, with their hesitancies and planar complexity, convey something of the mystery of the human head beyond the material fact of the face and skull. Oddly enough, le Brocquy's work is conspicuous by its absence in IMMA's latest display drawn from its permanent collection, "EnVisage" (perhaps the le Brocquys are on loan elsewhere).

The 60 or so works that are included demonstrate artists' - and pretty much everybody's - fascination with the face. We are acutely attuned to minute variations in facial physiognomy. Some faces become icons - Jesus, Che, Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, Hitler - but we can also read the most anonymous faces like books, taking in a wealth of information without a word being said.

One of the largest constituent exhibits in "EnVisage" is a room devoted to Brian Maguire's Casa Di Cultura project undertaken a few years ago in Sao Paolo. He made portrait drawings of the children attending school in the shanty towns and then photographed the drawings in the children's makeshift homes. Simultaneously he made drawings from the mugshots reproduced daily in the popular press of those convicted and imprisoned. What struck him was that he was drawing people at different stages of one inexorable process. Potentially, the dispossession and poverty of those inhabiting the shanty towns directed them towards criminalisation and channelled them into the maw of the cruel judicial system. The educational project he observed represented a modest bid to change the outcome of this bleak process.

His images, in responding openly and honestly to each sitter, insist on the individuality and rights of every child.

Another major part of "EnVisage" consists of an Irish equivalent of Maguire's Sao Paolo project, in the form of a series of terrific cast-plaster portrait busts of the boys of the sixth class of Francis Street Primary School in 1994, by American artist John Ahearne. As curator Catherine Marshall notes, it is a life-sized, three-dimensional class photograph. Again, what comes across in these almost eerily realistic busts is the extraordinary, irrepressible individuality and vitality of the subjects.

Most of us do not know them individually, and yet we recognise them, we can read their faces.

Time and again the head is treated as a monumental presence. Everything about Stephan Balkenhol's rough-hewn head suggests that it is a sculptural fanfare for the common man: it is mounted not grandly on a vast plinth but on a domestic stool. Instead of depicting some carefully composed, self- important leader, it features an everyman kind of guy, someone you'd pass by in the street without a second glance. Finally, Balkenhol doesn't even make a big deal of his process, allowing the natural properties of the wood to come through.

Both Eithne Jordan's and Martin Wedge's painted heads are enormous, each swollen to fill the available space of the canvas. Wedge's Seer has a slightly disturbing, magic-realist quality to it. It looks as if it is literally bursting with knowledge. Jordan's Split Head, on the other hand, has a heroic, stoical air.

It comes from a time when she was making work that explores the situation of woman as nexus of myriad demands, and there is a suggestion of both calm endurance and the expanse of inner life, while the split perhaps underlines the notion of needing to be all things to all people in her life.

Of course, faces are likenesses. Portrait painters are often in the position not only of capturing likeness but of actually establishing it. The remarkable Edward Maguire, who died in 1986, was one of the most gifted, individualistic Irish artists of the 20th century. He always pushed his portrait paintings towards iconic statements of character. His Seamus Heaney, not in IMMA's collection, is a case in point.

But there are two very good portraits, plus a drawing, here. One is of poet and writer Pearse Hutchinson, the other (and the drawing) of the late Patrick Collins, the painter.

The obsessive Maguire, himself a portrait of the artist as control freak, always runs the risk of pinning his subjects down like butterflies. Yet his work has an enduring quality that sets it apart.

A recurrent theme in the show relates to masking or disguise. Mary Farl Powers's masked self-portrait is a beautiful print and might be read as an account of someone declining to make themselves available to our gaze. Marina Abramovic, in an exploratory identity switch, swapped places with a prostitute from Amsterdam's red-light district for a day and the show features portrait snaps of each in the guise of the other. Janine Antoni, whose early work was greatly concerned with interposing her own, emblematic, female presence into the discourse of contemporary Western art, presents her head and shoulders in the guise of a hooded bell: hidden but not voiceless, perhaps.

If you tend to associate the face with straightforward portrait images, you will find plenty of these at "EnVisage", but the great strength of the exhibition is the sheer diversity and ingenuity of response to a universal theme that it demonstrates. If we think of that conventional portrait image as growing with the humanism of the Renaissance, this show suggests that, from the start of the 20th century, artists have been figuring out ways of questioning and deconstructing it.

"EnVisage: the Face in Contemporary Art" is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until April 2002.