CARISSA FARRELL DISCUSSES JOHN BYRNE’S NEW PUBLIC ARTWORK COMMISSIONED BY FINGAL COUNTY COUNCIL.
John Byrne’s new public artwork, An Comórtas/The Contest (2024), commissioned by Fingal County Council, was on temporary public exhibition in the Carnegie Library, Swords (1 May – 1 June 2024) prior to its permanent installation in the future Swords Cultural Quarter development. An Comórtas is described as a work, “created with, for and about the people of Fingal” that features 55 Fingal residents who volunteered to be part of this project through call outs in the local press, social media, and ‘street casting’ by Byrne himself. This brought forth an eclectic, charming and heroic cross section of individuals, couples, friends and families varying in age, ethnicity and sex.
An Comórtas is a composite, back-lit photograph made to look like a nineteenth-century Romantic painting, printed on PVC banner material, measuring seven by two metres. The composition for the work is lifted directly from two early iconic works from the period: Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). Byrne aligns the structure of both and scatters his cast into two groups over two specially constructed sloping rostrums. Drama is captured in a palette of warm earthy tones of cream, yellow, ochre, brown and deep red. A sublime Caravaggesque light lifts the restrained approach to costume, which is largely and deliberately the volunteers’ own.

Around them, an implausible version of the Fingal coastline highlights its iconic features with sand banks leading to the sea, Ireland’s Eye, a Martello Tower, and an Aer Lingus airplane climbing into the sky. Technology and art direction are substantially evident in the making of An Comórtas, but its nucleus is powered by the volunteers and the artist’s interaction with them. These are ordinary and extraordinary humans whose presence resonates from the simplest things, their physical being, their sense of themselves, their belonging, consciousness, difference and commonality. Their unguarded joy and willingness to invest in Byrne’s vision anchors this work firmly in the public realm.
In an anteroom, a short video sees Byrne describe some of the technical and artistic decisions that were made during the production while avoiding the substantive question of the specific association between the Medusa and Liberty paintings and An Comórtas. Gericault’s masterpiece depicts a grotesque moment of human depravity attributed to the French state’s failure after the re-instatement of the monarchy in 1815, while Delacroix’s work commemorates the 1830 revolution that restored the republic. The juxtaposition of the extreme horror of the French Revolution with Byrne’s heroic rally of mindful citizens is difficult to reconcile. But this kind of amplified narrative ark is visible in previous work by Byrne, when, in 2016 he responded to an invitation by Dublin City Council’s LAB Gallery to consider “what contribution we (artists) might make to future readings of the 1916 rising”, by reconstructing memories from his childhood holidays away from Belfast in a series of nostalgic pastoral photographs. Storytelling is Byrne’s analysis. On a practical level, the exaggerated dramatic style of nineteenth-century composition is a perfect instrument to explore a public art project involving such a large group of people. The potential for intrigue, rapport and drama is huge.

It is impossible to ignore the parallels of political turmoil and human tragedy in the source works against the backdrop of the current state of Irish affairs. In the foreground, a circle of men, women and children strain backwards pulling on ropes from one another; behind them a young man and woman reach higher ground, seeking rescue with a raven and a red cloth. Many individuals gravitate ceremoniously to the centre, carrying ‘offerings’ of Golden houses. Others hold tightly to provisions of bread, vegetables, crops, farmyard animals, and lumps of rubble, while a young boy formally displays an electric plug. Byrne hints to certain issues in these totemic objects and ceremony; housing, the cost of living, climate change, and so on. But An Comórtas explores these on human terms;how the internal world of the individual registers and processes events in the external world, so that life can go on. The cast of An Comórtas persevere side by side, present, together, homogenous and different. Their relevance is as a collective and as individuals – as citizens of Fingal, Ireland, and the world.
Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.