Brien Coleman has found in the vast image stream of our culture of printed media a personal visual vocabulary through which he speaks with ease and fluency. His is a foreign language without any words, composed of compounded images only, yet the rest of us can readily understand it, whether or not we ourselves have words to describe what he shows us. He is an artist who has done a tremendous amount of looking -- at paintings, photographs, printmaking, periodicals, printed matter of every kind -- and then through his collage technique and colorations shows us the distilled essence of what these images mean, what they mean together, and what they mean to him. BC's work is full of references and quotations, to such prior artists as Andreas Vesalius, the Renaissance printmaker who specialized in anatomical studies, to the English poet and artist William Blake, whose "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" speaks in similar terms -- to Henri Matisse's teacher, Odilon Redon, whose own niche in the art of the fantastic was cut more than a century ago -- and to Heironymous Bosch, Albrecht Durer, Fuseli, to Persian and Egyptian motifs, to Asian art and to Chinese and Japanese prints. The pieces featured in PHANTASMAGORIC IMAGE are transcendental and in being so, touch on and include the apocalyptic, the fantastic, the meditative, the profane, the sacred, and the psychedelic.

Vesalius, whose printed broadsheets educated 15th Century Europe on human anatomy , depicted musculature dissected away from bone during a time when the body was believed controlled by the Four Humors identified by the 8th Century physician Galen. BC's art discloses the human being in his anatomic facts, set against what Beat poet Allen Ginsberg called, "...the starry dynamo of the machinery of night." The psychic topographies Brien imagines transpire on heavenly spheres where landscapes unfold, personages appear, portents are told, omens are cast, and histories happen, and his vision is like that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kublai Khan" - a stately pleasure dome composed of vaulted caves of crystal ice where the poet contemplates all that is transcendent and Divine.

Opulence was a key theme to Odilon Redon -- he depicted royal personages in the clothes of state symbols as rich as the eyes of peacock feathers, and Coleman traffics in the Opulent also. Durer's woodcuts disclose a flattened pictorial space hatched with intricate tracery, and BC takes pictorial space steps further, flattening it to the extent that a New York action painter of the 1950s would, and in the next image using as much pictorial depth as outer space could offer, could we fly up to outer space to see for ourselves. They are all well versed in the language of the Intricate.

If we modern people are to understand ourselves, our world, and the universe we are in and the Deity who breathed it into being in the first instance, we must be able to grasp what the poet Rainier Maria Rilke called "the Unsayable." Brien Coleman's compositions take on the Unsayable, and with them he says, "Here is the realm where I perceive the Unsayable, and being that it is so, here is what it seems to say to me."

While he sometimes shows dystopia in his images, Brien Coleman's work is more than simply another commentary on decadence and the eerie and chilling aspects in modern life, for it encompasses that and says yet more, and in this the Transcendent and the Extraordinary unroll before us through his work as would a golden carpet before the feet of Suleiman the Magnificent.

In his "Goya 2000," we see echoes of St. Augustine's "City of God," of René Magritte's castle built on a boulder floating in the air, though Coleman's exalted city is high on a landbound promontory and buzzed by kamikaze pterodactyls slicing through a sky that could have darkened El Greco's "View of Toledo." This image from Coleman's "Phantasmania" series contains also a Garden of Earthly Delights as its foreground landscape, though one that has more in common with a Quaker artist's Peaceable Kingdom of 1760 than it does with Heironymous Bosch's famous painting.

"Zenobia" shows us a planetary observatory presided over by a countess, lovingly vivisected and gowned in lace, brocade and velvet, a personage of our present age where knowledge is eclipsed by information and flying saucers have the damascene patterns of the stoma of the undersides of leaves. His "Crocodeedja" takes us to the pictorial spaces of 1930s Giorgio de Chirico, with its raking perspectives, stage set elements: orange sunlight, where a yellow Laocoon writhes, while the Gorgon Medusa seethes nearby.

Coleman's collage "Kizmet" is as rich and rare as true love fated to last the ages, and in his gilded beauties are echoes of Gustav Klimt's "Lovers" -- a depicted ineffable that dissolves like Islamic calligraphy on the tiled mosque walls of love. It is a religious art also, that shows us that the royal courts of Lord Krishna and Lord Buddha are beautiful in a like way that a painted Tokyo woman is in the neon lights of the Ginza.

A great deal of Brien Coleman's collage art is religious, meditative, and devotional. His "Mandala" series opens with "Red Ant Dream" -- an oval horizontal composition that combines elements of Art Nouveau design, and is organized by vertical and horizontal symmetry, using the bodies of red ants as kaleidoscopic elements. This is luscious stuff, and it is also a restful, object of meditation. He invites us into the places that intrigue him, where he feels comfortable..

"SibylVariation" is all arabesque patterns overseen by golden brains, and the subsequent "SybilConfig" show us the arabesque multipled like a Tarot card into vertical and horizontal symmetries.

His "Osirius" series show us Mammon ruled over by the Egyptian god Osiris (Ausar) who reigns over doubled gilded World Trade Centers. "Skull Mirage" is like an ornate glass paperweight exploding with color and esoteric allusion... The mirrored grace of "Giraffe Mandala" where twin white giraffes are doubled into four by their own reflection leads us to wonder how with such long necks they seem to be seahorses floating among Gnostic apostles. "Oiseau" is beautiful in its own right for its ancient mystic bird whose wings spread and fold in benediction.