by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

No point going too far into detail here about the life and times of Brooklyn-based artist Joe Coleman. The documentary Rest in Pieces more than handles that. It explores the Catholic passion and painful parental dysfunction of Coleman's childhood, his violent pranks and amateur autopsies, his resounding misanthropy and reciprocal empathy toward the marginalized and demonized.

Coleman's rich, pulsating canvases, long since familiar to devotees of dangerous art, capture in excruciating detail not only his own inner torment but the lives of serial killers and sideshow freaks, outsider artists and classic American oddballs. Where some artists seek to create the beauty that largely eludes us, Coleman boldly reveals the evil and ugliness that we can deny but never truly escape.

Coleman's deepest secret, as candidly revealed by an ex-wife in RIP, is that he's really a super nice guy. This the Mirror discovered when it rang Coleman up at the Odditorium, the cluttered museum of pickled fetuses, archaic torture implements, creepy toys and further strange stuff that he calls his home and studio.

Mirror: In Rest in Pieces, you mention your childhood exposure to the Stations of the Cross, and it reminded me of my realization that the Stations of the Cross are, given the format, the first comic strip any Catholic reads.

Joe Coleman: It is very much sequential art. I was also later influenced by illuminated manuscripts. Those are very much like comics too, the use of words and images, which is the way my paintings are as well. Each painting could almost be considered a page, because they connect to each other. They're a continuous narrative - narratives within narratives within narratives. Comics came soon after that -

M: Did you find links between them?

JC: Yeah, not only the narrative-art aspect. There was something about the morality, too. The comics that I first came across were these monster comics called Creepy and Eerie. The fact that they were in black and white somehow implied this morality as well.

M: You mention that in RIP, in the context of film noir.

JC: I don't know, there's something about the sense of right and wrong, good and evil, sane and insane - the fact that there's a duality shown in the simplest forms. Religion itself is an attempt to define, to order the chaos, the mystery of life itself. There is no answer to these mysteries, how unfair it is.

Pieces of Joe

M: You also point out, in the film, the distinction between the iconographic sensibility of Bosch and Brueghel, and the later aesthetic, suggestive approach of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Your work, like a number of Catholic artists - Frida Kahlo, for instance - is still grounded in the iconographic. The filling up of as much space as possible, and how every element is fully - I'd say explicitly - defined.

JC: The need to paint, for me, is to try to control overpowering emotional forces. Those forces can include love. There's a great fear - I painted my current wife and myself, it was a painting called "Love Song," about the love I have for this woman, but it was also full of fear. I had to paint, and have in sharp focus, this love, and have our first date there, and things that I cherish about her and things that she said to me. Every square inch of surface is filled, and then I put charms there to protect the love, and took our body parts - some of my hair, her fingernails -

M: - like a reliquary.

JC: Exactly. That way, I can hold it, in the same manner as, if you go back to tribal art, the fetish object that will represent your fears, that you can put them into. You have to have this devotion, to pour out this passion in order to imbue the object with spirits. That's not about aesthetics. It's about transforming the object into the very thing that's inside of you - you can have it, hold it, look at it and protect it.

M: On the subject of fetishes and relics, your Odditorium is something of a private museum of the lurid, the grotesque and the bizarre. Do you think this self-created environment is essential to comfortable and confident creation?

JC: I can only speak for myself, but I know how important it is for me. What's disturbing for me is when I go into an apartment and it's just these bare white walls and minimal furnishings. It seems like it came out of a catalogue. That's scary because there's nothing of the person. They're hiding. For me, my insides are outside, all over the place. They can be really frightening, but they're friends now. They could be things that are very disturbing for me, but I've transformed them into these worshipful objects that are like my family and give me comfort and solace.

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