Cian McLoughlin's 'Madness and the Cure for Madness' at Molesworth Gallery, Dublin

Molesworth Gallery in Dublin presents 'Madness and the Cure for Madness', a solo exhibition by Irish painter Cian McLoughlin (b. 1977). The show marks the gallery's reopening after Ireland's lockdown, the longest in Europe. McLoughlin, known for figurative portraiture, shifts focus to crowd imagery, amplifying abstraction. His large canvases feature dense marks, tangles, and clots of paint. The artist explores crowd psychology, drawing on Gustave Le Bon's 'The Crowd' (negative collective soul) and Sigmund Freud's view of crowd behavior as driven by identification and love. McLoughlin cites historian George Lefebvre: 'Perhaps only in the crowd do people abandon petty daily concerns and become subjects of history.' He employs a 'two-distance painting' method: close-up, the paint appears abstract and sensory; from afar, form and composition cohere. The crowd becomes a metaphor for loss of self and belonging, reflecting pandemic-era absence and disorientation. The exhibition runs through June 30, 2021.