by MATTHEW WOODLEY

"If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos," once wrote Carlos Castaneda. For Toly Kouroumalis, who counts the author as an inspiration, chaos always seems close at hand.

"The world's been a shithole for ages," he says. "Painting is a way to unleash, to vent from the perils and the vices of society, the fucking bullshit. So many people are just full of crap that I just get fed up and I want to paint, like disappear into a little room."

Words like that tend to come with an accompanying torrent of spit, but Kouroumalis, sitting in his home in Chateauguay, sounds almost aloof on the other end of the phone, his voice often giving in to faint chuckles that suggest he's getting a bit of kick out of himself. Maybe his art is unleashing enough. Maybe he's hungover.

"I came back to Montreal and I started hanging out in all the clubs," he says. "But I'm in Chateauguay right now and there's a lot of 18-year-olds and they'd call me up and they're like, ‘I've got a 40, let's go and drink,' and I'd say, ‘Well I'm not doing anything.'" Some of the painting ideas came from that. And some of them come from more mature places."

Kouroumalis, 32, has been in his hometown for eight months, this following a few years in Vancouver's junkie-strewn downtown east side, a divorce, and travels he likens to a dark Kerouacian adventure. His newest batch of paintings, with their comic figures scrawled under blotches of colour, reflect it all. "When things go awry it just seems to be around me," he says. "I travelled a lot after my wife and I split up and when you travel alone, people from different walks of life approach you. You get involved with the wrong crowd."

He describes "Lady Luck and Pick Up," as one example: "When I was living out in B.C. I had a pickup truck, and me and this girl just hung around drunk for like two weeks. So I wrote this song that goes, ‘Spread eagle in the back of my pick-up truck, mickey and a 2-4 in her hand.' Her eyes are blanked out because she's on crack."

This makes the dismembered girl in "Canadian Cannibal Gothic" most interest-piquing. "It's a family in the woods who carve up people and eat them," he explains. "Maybe I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre and did it, I don't remember."

So he's not just inspired by memories. "No, I'm pretty into the whole dream state," he clarifies. "Plus I'm an experimental filmmaker and I channel a lot of that stuff into my work. I'm making a feature right now about a filmmaker who can't get enough funding so he gets tricked into entering a bare-knuckles boxing brawl."

There's more. "Yeah, I just finished a script about a bunch of rockabilly kids who become immortal on planet Mars and there's this red, glowing orb that creates a group of zombies and they've gotta fight them. This is my way of getting by."

Toly Kouroumalis's Lucid Dreams in a Winter of Death is on display at Zeke's Gallery (3955 St-Laurent) until Aug. 29