Coleman's paintings project his deep sense of the disrupted psyche and its disintegrated language "Mommy/Daddy" (1994) and "The Man Who Walked Through Walls" (1995). Short texts and incantations are introduced around the edges of the frame. The written word and painted image always generate a strong visual collision. Coleman's fractured consciousness is reformulated as an amalgamation of image and text. In more developed works, "Lovesong" (1998)/"In the Realms of the Unreal" (1998) Coleman often surrounds and even penetrates the picture with spiritual texts, inserted as an enraged incantation. The phrases serve as protection for his newly rescuitated self. The paintings carry a corporal force. The images emerge from the picture from a process of internal incision and interrogation. They manifest an instinctive articulation of a damaged psychic soul in disunity, adrift in an oceanic space of abject negativity and profound desire. At its most deranged these paintings become the raw material for probing fears – about the loss of an ability to determine identity, and deflect threats to the body.Look at any one of these paintings . . . At first it seems like it's chaotic, but it's just the opposite – it's order. It's an attempt to order the chaos, to put in control, to harness it.
Joe Coleman [4]
Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.
~~ The Marquis de Sade [5]
In adopting a set of ideas that may be termed the "Poe-definition of perversity" [6]. Sade inverts tradition ethics so that everything leads to an evil conclusion. In his fiction he employs the relativity of values in full and maintains that the world is such that only vice is rewarded. Sade uses an anti-Aristotelian model of perversity, of aggressive and submissive pleasure denying the conclusion to the effect that viciousness is a value. He aims at disruption and nihilism.
