Visual art

AMERICANS HAVE A Byzantine relationship to their artworks, and Keegan McHargue likes to illustrate this with a line from the first chapter of Thomas Pynchon's paradigmatic San Francisco novel, The Crying of Lot 49. The mogul Pierce Inverarity has kept a bust of Jay Gould, his hero, on a narrow shelf over his bed. "Was that how he'd died, [Oedipa] wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house?"

McHargue was still in his teens when the elements came to him, and ever since, the Portland, Ore., native, 22, has been working out their permutations. There have been experiments in multimedia, but it's his painting and drawing that have made people sit up from here to New York, London, and beyond. McHargue's work is perplexing on many fronts, but it's strangely persuasive; it insinuates itself into the viewer's central nervous system, delivering its tingles hours, or days, later.

McHargue's figuration recalls the bas-reliefs in Greek temples: strange animals with the bodies of men, the heads of birds; among them float beatific goddesses, eyes ringed with mehendi or kohl. Picture after picture plunges us into the world we first glimpsed in our Cradle of Life textbooks in middle school: harsh, stubby male things, all elbows and attitude, with antlers or the horns of bulls pose atop volcanoes on planets with three moons. McHargue's line is sinuous when it's not choppy. He's like an Aubrey Beardsley hopped up with the violent moods and color of a Frank Frazetta. Starkness and lavishness combine and wrestle each other across the canvas. Like small knives, diagonals slash and burn, drawing the eye ever sideways and down, as though the gaze were forced to the ground by the materialization of some horrid divine presence.

The strain of orientalism that threads through McHargue's work is probably keeping Edward Said spinning in his grave, but we never get the sense that these towering minarets, turbaned demigods, and perfumed sunsets are being used as mere exotica. They're standards of a mysterious power, and through each panel in his striplike works – for we can consider McHargue's work in the same way we do Henry Darger's, as a continuous narrative of exchange and fertility – we become privy to rituals from a past so distant that we only recall it through a vivid sense memory. The effect is rehabilitative, in line with his mission to rescue art practice from a pervasive solipsism. "We could do this or that in art," he says, "but why don't we try to change the world?"

Compositionally, he rarely falters. He laughs, crediting his mother's influence early in his training. "She used to make us draw upside-down as well as right side up – drawing, practicing cursive, everything. You don't see something until you see it wrong side up."

We experience McHargue's appearance on the scene with the same bewildered excitement with which prewar audiences greeted the Ballet Russe of Sergei Diaghilev. I think of Diaghilev and his designer Leon Bakst when entering into McHargue's quasi-historical fantasia, and indeed, if Nijinsky were alive today, he'd be buying up, with the savage abandon of Petrouchka, every McHargue he could lay his henna-ed hands on. Jack Smith, you would have loved this work too. Like the Universal films of the 1940s with the star you adored, Maria Montez, McHargue shows us a world without boundaries, a world of women, regal as planets, with huge bamboo headdresses, chalices for eyes, cruel lower lips, and veins pumping copper and salt. "Give me ... the cobra jewel!" (Kevin Killian)