"Life is about the mysterious", states Coleman. "Nature is about one thing – culling the herd, culling the children who don't procreate. We try to make it that everything is about us. Nature can think of something way better. You think you’ve got it under control, but you’ve got it wrong." [7]

Sade's nature is a destructive force whose influence provides the frame of human action and its casual consequences. From a metaphysical perspective nature in the Sadean model is not a static thing, some kind of external element, but a dynamic principle or force – almost a living entity. It appears to have its own will. Nature possesses no values but is fundamentally destructive. Nature annihilates and creates a void. The trajectory however cannot easily be detailed –the ruins that are resultant, as one would expect, are nebulous. Since this principle of nature represents chaos or entropy, it does not leave a space for elements of consistency and ends.

Primarily Sadeian narratives of chaos achieve a degree of calamity at the fictional level, but this principle of nature demands the destruction of both the human and the artificial. In this respect the protagonists struggle for self-preservation and "success" in life contradicts the norms derivable from the principle of nature. If it is a natural consequence to destroy, why do individuals hesitate or refuse to include their own lives in this nihilistic spiral?

The explanation is grounded in the notion that natural laws and the principles of natural activity constitute a myth. Therefore we are able to shed the question of the "meaning" of laws (which would otherwise constitute an insoluable problem). The natural – essence of the world/everything that is "real" – which destroys should be interpreted as a myth, functioning as a narrative line with veiled meaning and covering all that is essential about life. In this sense the principle of nature is an allusion to the "truth" that the world is chaotic. In other words (casual) consequences of actions are uncontrollable, unlike (intentional) results which represent what is artificial in the social environment.

The allegorical mode of nature in Sade's writings reveals the foundation upon which his perspective is constructed. Everything is random so whatever the individual encounters are matters of opportunism and of indiscriminately appropriating whatever is available. The individual is in constant motion and can never afford to stop; and would appear powerless. Therefore whatever results from action is negative.

The Sadeian individual will address discontent/frustration towards things, which can neither be controlled nor violated. This sub-materialistic metaphysics has no scientific basis other than its dynamic force, which produces series of random causal consequences. The basic/fundamental possible construct Sade proposes is a notion of the natural that makes the world external to the individual. In a sub-materialistic formulation, nature as such is external/indestructible. This affords little consolation. Everything dies so that something else may be re-born. In this respect only matter and force are real, this is why they cannot die. Under the blind forces of life and death nature is reconstructed. Nature destroys and procreates in a constant process. In Sade’s view creation itself is chaotic because it can neither be controlled nor utilized.

The reason why nature makes the individual restless and opportunistic is that chaos cannot maintain normative laws/values. The human must initiate an artificial/relative value structure. The key point is that nothing seems forbidden in nature. Therefore the only thing to do is participate in the “life” of nature – which is constantly to be drawn to annihilation/nihilism. Although humanity is a constituent element in nature, humanity and nature are totally independent of each other. The contrast between creation and destruction is advanced and found to be meaningless.

Let us dare do violence to this unintelligible Nature, the better to master the art of enjoying her.
~~ Marquis de Sade [8]

"Say you look at a piece of Jesus Christ in a reliquary", says Coleman, "and a baby in a medical museum and the hand of a murderer in a crime museum. They're interchangeable. Each one creates a kind of awe – just like lap dance places and side shows. In Christian culture they have disdained the dark gods, the dark side of people's souls. I see just as much (validity) in Eastern religions as Christianity – also voodoo and Satanism."
~~ Joe Coleman [9]

Through his own vision and process as an artist, which he protects without compromise, Joe Coleman is a true outsider an outlaw. Colman's method, although he uses acrylic paint, has more affinity to medieval icon painting or sacred manuscript illumination than to contemporary practice. The paintings are detailed non-linear narratives. Like an icon painter, he reaches for a sense of spiritual commune with the figures/images he paints, manifesting "likeness" in regard that these presence's for him are a form of mystical doppelganger to the figures they represent. Painting becomes an ecstatic mystical communion with meaning. This method informs every aspect of his process, from the intimacy with which he works – employing an "opti-loupe" (magnifying lens/visor) to render the minuscule detail that is his signature style – to the intuitive practice of his composition. He begins where the "spirit" moves him to start and constructs the painting piece-by-piece as other figures, passages, phrases and correlation's arise.

Coleman claims that these paintings must literally be "framed" with "charms and borders" in order to protect external factors from their power. He describes them as "evocations . . . a kind of raising the dead – and in the way that sorcerers would draw a circle when evoking or raising a devil, you need that circle to protect yourself. And I can only raise the ones that I identify with . . . I'm interested in the parts of them that reflect myself." [10]

These paintings are in a way both religious icons and self-portraits. Coleman's modern "saints", Tod Browning, Harry Houdini, Albert Fish, Adolf Hitler, Carl Panzram, Charles Manson, Edgar Allen Poe and Hasil Adkins like himself live (or lived) outside accepted culture. In choosing them as icons, Coleman reflects his own self-investigation as well as directly pointing to the contradictions and extremes of the world in which we exist.