My interest in the tragic lives of infamous murderers such as Charles Manson, Carl Panzram, Albert Fish can be traced to a fascination with the life of Jesus Christ which was, like theirs, filled with suffering, injustice and brutality. Like Jesus Christ these men had dual identities of ultimate masochist and sadist, hero and villain. Christ and anti-Christ. I was always told that I won't find Jesus looking up in the sky, that I'll find him looking inside myself.
~~ Joe Coleman [1]

The extrovert art of Joe Coleman combines heterogeneous and vastly different influences these range through the medieval and classical renaissance although they also include contemporary American Expressionism. He has incorporated images from art history as well as the world of popular culture and mass media. Coleman fuses these ideas with impulses from personal and religious sources until the abundance of what he has accumulated results in that "primeval material" which literally is spread throughout the painting.

Coleman's paintings produce a dramatic reaction. They are without doubt numinous but also strangely seductive and voluptuous. They offer a release from purity. Equipped with melodrama titles they seem both absurd and formidable, arrogant and daring.

Coleman seeks to overwhelm the viewer with gigantic paintings, unfolding such an overpowering magic that no effect is too extreme as long as it serves the purpose of enchanting the viewer.

The style he adopts is as meticulous as his choice of iconography. Figurative and symbolic elements occur side by side, metaphors and narrative seem to be employed in parallel. Image, style, material and technique are utilized and combined, cannibalized and enshrined.

Coleman's work displays considerable technical calculation, even when it lacks obvious refinement. It is full of aesthetic ploys which only the initiated will recognise. His deployment of technique is precisely the aspect of his art which renders evidence of considerable cultural sophistication.

Joe Coleman's paintings illustrate his unique beautiful and frequently terrifying attempts to organize the chaos that is both around him and inside him. In some ways these paintings are like books and films, in some ways like cartoons, or nightmare visions, but they are not like images and words. They are associations and obsessions that come from some deep place inside Joe Coleman's psyche and soul, and are then "miraculously" transferred into amazing paintings.

Coleman's paintings invite a mixed mode of reading which combines art criticism and philosophy. He paints wickedness as a strong and grand phenomenon which provides glory and spectacle, and entails opportunities for enjoyment, creativity and satisfaction. Certainly the attempts to shatter all norms is related to an individuals freedom and creativity. It is, however, mainly related to subversive action.

The primary function of this project is to illustrate an "intersection" processed from developing a creative "animation" between a Deleuzo-Sadean schema and the paintings of Joe Coleman. In this examination it is the attempt to adopt a strategy according to a Deleuzian mechanism, proceeding by unfolding the conceptual intersections with the material in the program.

The Marquis de Sade creates a comprehensive literary project in order to examine the wickedness of will and all its manifestations. Sade's metaphysics claims that nature must be regarded as the original principle of death and destruction. He views nature in terms of a classic atomistic model – the universe is a giant vortex of bodies loaded with energy and "canatos". The collision of atoms is the "truth" of nature, and consequently in this model there are no transcendental values/divine. Sade is an atheist and therefore supports a naturalistic counter-ethic. The principle laws of nature prescribe destruction – violent collisions – which are allied to the psychology of pleasure via the orgiastic experience of nothingness. Murder is the passion, which Sade seeks to "justify" in this structure. Conflict is the operative catalyst. Sade's metaphysics illuminates his psychology of pleasure leading to the heart of darkness – evil manifested. Sade constructs an inverted ethics in which conventional virtue becomes vice and vice becomes virtue. Traditional values become unknown/irrelevant in the Sadeian model, he needs to break "true" values and annihilate the valid laws of religion/morality. This is what destructive nature determines – and in order to derive pleasure, something must be destroyed, namely virtue. Two conflicting sets of legitimate values exist, those which one transgresses and those which one aims to destroy. Transgression is the first stage of destruction – it shatters the borders. The essential principle is subversion, the essence of perversion, to undermine all known rules/principles in order to derive pleasure from what is inside/underneath/out of sight. One leaves behind the transgressed. The ultimate result is "transcendence" inside, not beyond the shattered limits.

The comprehensive worlds constructed in Joe Coleman's paintings function like a Moebius strip. The Moebius strip that results from joining the two ends of a strip of twisted surface is unexpected and ambiguous. It is a surface with only one side, which may be called either the top or the bottom. The surface itself leaves everything visible to anyone who travels along it; nothing can be obscured or located on such a surface, because it has only one side. It might be regarded as an impossibility but like the "transcendence" in Sade's fiction, it follows singular mechanical laws. Like Coleman's bleached-out humanism it is one-sided and unique.

Coleman provides a comprehensive "new" world for his illuminated subjects, celebrating cruel relations/situations under the gaze of the audience – the viewers, who themselves are unable to reach transcendence trapped in the ruins of their values. The Coleman characters inhabit an inverted world of chaos. They experience pain, transgress borders/limits, and come into existence in situations stimulated by pain.