The first thing that strikes you about Brian Maguire’s paintings is how familiar they seem. Anyone who has merely glanced at the news in recent years would easily recognise Aleppo. This alone is a sobering fact. The paintings in the exhibition represent portraits of Aleppo based on the artist’s visit to Syria in March of last year. In a way, they are more like a documentary, the paintings stark with little embellishment. Maguire attempts to encapsulate the sense of desolation that has come to represent the ruined urban landscape under an international focus. None of the works have an individual title, each is merely labelled with the name of the city and a number. The features of each painting are defined in cool tones of grey and blue with the occasional interruption of brown and red. Each one focuses on the destruction of the city’s landscape by emphasising the skeletal frameworks of the remains of buildings. In terms of human contact, there is almost none to be found. Signs of life are limited to sparse laundry lines or in one instance a rare human figure. Each painting dominates its own wall space and, when taken in all together, the effect can be likened to the creation of modern ruins. Yet, despite these qualities, they do not lack emotion. Maguire’s paintings are honest and deeply subjective portraits of the city as he perceived it. Each landscape seems to meditate on the violence and sense of abandonment that brought Aleppo to its current form and serves as a sharp reminder of both the war and ongoing refugee crisis. Amidst the partially collapsed apartment blocks, there remains the grim reality that life does continue in places such as Aleppo, a fact easily forgotten by the casual reader of a Sunday morning newspaper. War Changes Its Address is a reminder that conflict is a constant occurrence in daily life, even if we choose to turn away from it. Maguire’s paintings are a powerful confrontation of this reality.
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War Changes Its Address is currently showing in the Irish Museum of Modern Art until May 6.
