In mid July 2025, Servane Peffer, intern at Olivier Cornet Gallery, wrote about Eoin Mac Lochlainn's 'Sumud'. This painting is on view and available for sale at the gallery (1,000 euro).  

Before even applying at the Olivier Cornet Gallery for an internship, as I was exploring the website of the gallery to discover more about it, I was struck by the artwork ‘Sumud’ by Eoin Mac Lochlainn. Even though I didn’t know anything about this great Irish artist at the time nor his intentions behind the work, this blurry charcoal face lightened by these vivid pink (and green) shades appealed to me. It was like I had fallen in love with a piece of art and learning about it made me like it more and more. 

‘Sumud’ is a charcoal and watercolour on Fabriano paper first exhibited at the group exhibition ‘Pink is my colour’, a Bloomsday / Summer exhibition shown at the Olivier Cornet Gallery between June and August 2024 and centred around the colour pink. It was also later visible, alongside other works from the same series, at the Art Evolve 2025 art fair organised at the Royal Dublin Society in April 2025. But this work of art is part of a much wider artistic project started in 2022: ‘Cogadh na gCarad’, which means ‘War between Friends’. Eoin Mac Lochlainn, shocked by the comments made by the historian Diarmaid Ferriter who considered the Irish Civil War as a ‘small-scale affair’ with only about 1,400 people killed, decided to draw 1,400 portraits in remembrance of the dead and of the pain their disappearance caused to their loved ones. This massive production as well as a video installation resulted in a solo show at the Olivier Cornet Gallery between March and April 2023 and in a video projection at the Garden of Remembrance on the 7th, the 14th and the 21st of March 2023. However, we can guess by its title that ‘Sumud’ doesn’t commemorate a passed conflict like the Irish Civil War but a long-lasting war that is still going on today, notably in Gaza. The word ‘Sumud’ represents indeed the Palestinian resilience in front of the Israeli occupation of their territory, their will to preserve their identity and stay in a place they call home. By linking these two conflicts together through a same project, the artist shows us already the reality of History: an eternal cycle of conflicts. 

Much like the other works composing the Cogadh na gCarad project, ‘Sumud’ was not meant to portrait any precise victim but rather a person’s soul full of dreams and ambitions ripped of their chance to realise them by a violent death. Theses faces are no one we know and yet their distress can touch us all. In my opinion, this choice made by Eoin Mac Lochlainn of producing faces with undefined contours is a subtle way to allow any viewer to recognise in the shape of the ears, the nose, the lips, or the eyelid crease, in every line that composes these portraits, someone they have known, maybe loved, and lost, therefore, contributing into making the entire Cogadh na gCarad series universal. However, I also saw in those undefined portraits emerging from the dark charcoal background a battle led by the victims of war against the shadows of oblivion, for us not to forget how they died obviously, but also how they lived, opposing themselves to the violence of the History of wars which considers victims mostly through numbers but rarely remember their name or face let alone their story. 

If, in the first place, I was attracted by ‘Sumud’ for its colours (delicately applied by the skilled hand of the artist, I must say), it is in the end what this artwork (and the entire Cogadh na gCarad project that I discovered later) induced in me that made me fall for it. It made me feel. I may have suffered pain, sadness and anger which are not very positive feelings, but I felt and still feel when I look at this artwork, and I believe this to be the main purpose of art: trigger emotions. Nonetheless, I hope it’ll please Eoin Mac Lochlainn to learn that all these emotions combined resulted in me experiencing direct empathy. Thanks to his work, I felt even more compassion than before for those for whom war is their everyday lives. So, quoting the artist, if War is a failure of empathy, art is probably not the final solution, but it might help restoring this too much underestimated feeling into the heart of people.

Servane Peffer, July 2025

Note by the gallery: Works from the series 'Cogadh na gCarad' have entered prestigious collections such as the OPW State Art Collection and The Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, Indiana, USA). Since then, recent global conflicts have put this body of work in perspective for the artist as he continued to develop new work such as 'Sumud'. More recent paintings from the series were chosen by OPW director Patrick Murphy for Kites above the castle, a group show he curated for Dublin Gallery Weekend 2024. Others have been included in our critically-acclaimed touring group show 'What do we want?'.