Séamas O'Reilly: Masked Gardaí attendance of evictions is worthy of artistic critique

"The entire controversy over this artwork appears to be a deliberate, and almost laughably clumsy, attempt to distract from the fact that thousands of people in Ireland are currently facing eviction from their homes"

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

When I was young, I marvelled at Picasso’s Guernica. In libraries or school, or just about anywhere I might find books of 20th Century art, their pages were instantly thrown open to his works, so I could find a big enough picture of it that I could pore over it in rapt fascination. My first level of enjoyment was in the painting itself, its fractured lines and distorted perspectives. 

It was my first exposure to Picasso, and stood apart from the formal neatness and grandeur of more representational art, giving the impression of an artist doing things with shape and space that were devious, even illegal. And, if I’m honest, there was also the sense that a whole new avenue had opened up for artists who, like my 10-year-old self, also found it hard to stay inside the lines. There was hope for me yet, I thought, since dear old Pablo appeared to be a man after my own heart; he too possessed paints, a blank page, and a terrible track record of making his paintings resemble whatever it was he’d been looking at to begin with.