John Keane Todos Somos Marcos (1), 1995

In early 1995 John Keane spent time in Mexico for what was initially meant to be a holiday. Once there, he felt compelled to research the complex political landscape he observed. A serendipitous encounter with the 1939 book The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene, on the suppression of Catholicism by the socialist government in Mexico, revealed that Keane's and the author's respective itineraries almost matched, over fifty years apart.

Besides the admiration for Greene’s writing and the affinity with his artistic engagement with politics, this chance encounter sparked an exchange of letters between the artist and the writer and greatly influenced the work produced by Keane in response to his experience in Mexico.The figure repeated in the pattern of this linocut recurs in this body of work. It depicts the novelty dolls of the Subcomandante Marcos, fictitious name for the masked spokesperson of the Zapatista movement in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Todos Somos Marcos refers to their revolutionary slogan.