Natural, Keegan Mchargue’s debut exhibition at Frey Norris, demonstrates his flexibility in synthesizing and transcending the limitations of new materials; using them not as end points but as tools to communicate a larger set of ideas. The several dozen paintings and works on paper in “Natural” reflect an eclectic adventure, imagery springing from the artist’s diverse interests and varied investigations. Everything from pop music to snippets of art history to McHargue’s interest in design and branding, to more emotional and personal subject matter; the artist pulls his inspiration from all corners of culture with no real concept of hierarchy when it comes to image making. A toilet, a cartoon figure, abstract pattern or imagery from a magazine advertisement may carry similar weight to nuanced ideas by intellectual heavyweights like Walter Benjamin, Edward Bernays or Dave Hickey.

After years of focus on conceptually driven concerns, Mchargue has ultimately returned to his long held love of surface, playing with a 21st century reinvention of Romanticism. Humor remains, sometimes through his happy timeless characters, the Foibles. His work, which has always manipulated scale and repetition, now appears more abstract, the visual analogue of a more concrete kind of poetry, jazz-like exercises in improvisation. Often portions of other works are scaled up or down in a new piece, creating fresh imagery through working and re-working familiar themes throughout a given series. An interest in immediate satisfaction manifests through the collision of high formalism and a kind of loose, irreverent disregard for convention.

Self-taught McHargue has shown in recent years at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Vienna and Tokyo. His writing and interviews have appeared in The Believer and Beautiful Decay and his art resides in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMoMA and the Judith Rothschild Foundation, among others.