Keegan McHargue

Prick of Conscience

September 3 – October 5, 2013

Artist’s reception: September 12, 6-8pm

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Keegan McHargue. For Prick of Conscience, McHargue has returned to painting oil on canvas, incorporating both the broad range of abstract languages of his most recent drawing exhibitions and the figurative tableaux for which he first gained attention.  A catalog with an essay by Ross Simonini is being published on the occasion of this exhibition.

"[Keegan McHargue] compresses and reduces and distills the image until it functions, like an icon, on the simplest, most unfettered visual wavelengths. He thinks about the freedom inherent in minimalism while he works. It keeps his attention focused on the singularity of the idea, so that the image's energy appears to emerge from a point somewhere deep within itself and ripple outward into a sea of visual ideas, each one nestled into its neighbor, like a liquid puzzle. The feeling of looking is not dissimilar from seeing ancient Islamic and Hindu art, where narrative and space and subject flow into a single current. 

The lines, too, are liquid. What at first appears to be a straight, rigid line, is revealed, the longer you look, to veer and float. The environment gently sways between the proto-psychedelic luminance of Charles Burchfield's watercolors and the gentle west-coast roll of Ken Price's landscapes. Like John Wesley, Sigmar Polke, and the Cobra school, he uses the language of storybook illustration to simultaneously stabilize his work and subvert our visual comfort zones."

                      Ross Simonini