hile the paintings of Joe Coleman and the drawings of Tony Fitzpatrick are very different than those of Alfred Jensen and Forrest Bess, these younger artists share a number of things with their older counterparts: a belief in associative thinking, which is one aspect of imagination; an unlikely combination of disparate images and symbols; a density to their work that is born out of necessity rather than a desire to elaborate.

In his painting, At Home with Dian (1992), Coleman depicts himself and his companion sitting on a Balinese couch, which is as detailed and symbolic as any chair done by the Northern Renaissance painter, Rogier Van der Weyden. On the wall to the left of Dian is Coleman's painting of a painting of the Madonna, while on the wall to the right of him is his depiction of a more demonic self. The border of the painting is made of magical signs, which evokes his desire to protect the fragility of their domestic situation. For Coleman, partnership with another defines itself on a secular as well as symbolic level.

In the drawing, The Angel of Luna Park (1991), Tony Fitzpatrick both pays homage to his wife, Michele, and evokes her mythic, restorative powers. Her dense black hair and the night sky illuminated by the constellations are interchangeable, while her blouse and a sky full of guardian birds are collapsed together. The various sentences and sentence fragments read like lines from a love poem, both breathless in their directness and highly charged in their use of metaphor. The smudges and erasure that obscure some of the words evoke both the desire to declare his feelings as well as a need for privacy, love being a matter of both. Fitzpatrick, who in addition to being an artist is also a poet, incorporates a charged language of praise. The "Angel of Luna Park" is the presiding spirit of a place that is at once real and mythical, banal and magical, ordinary and fabulous.

es Mills's work is simultaneously austere and expressionistic, suggesting that he has both transformed and synthesized aspects of Minimalism and the distortions of Francis Bacon into something all his own. Although his works are small in scale, he is capable of conveying vast, often desolate landscapes. In Airstream, Mills depicts a mobile home that tilts forward, as if it has settled unevenly into the ground. In the foreground he has made a slightly tilting, dense, elongated rectangular shape out of black lines rising from the middle of the drawing's bottom edge. The shape can be read either as a tree stump or as a road which never reaches the Airstream.

Mills's juxtaposition of a small image and a larger abstract shape endows the drawing with an atmosphere of intense isolation. The unmarked areas of the paper become a wintry landscape, which seems as symbolic as it is referential. Mills's terse drawings are both reticent and volcanic personal touchstones, as well as evocations of a fragmented world ruled by imagination and an unabated sense of terror: a flashlight – a knife – a bridge – a cake; fetishistic emblems of a late 20th century shaman.

lthough none of the artists work in a reductive or essentializing manner, all of them seem to share with Bess a refusal to elaborate upon their visions, make them decorative and thus diminish their initial power. In addition, all of them utilize juxtaposition, the placing in proximity of disparate signs, images, and things, to evoke the meaning they are after. The subject may be the body, as it is for Bess, Bill Jensen, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Anna Zemankova; the turbulent nature of love and domesticity, as it is for Coleman, Fitzpatrick, Mark Greenwold and Gregory Gillespie; or the inevitable isolation to which every individual must eventually succumb, as it is for John Kane, Wes Mills, Jenny Scobel, and Robert Lostutter. The intersection of utopia and dystopia form the subject of James Barsness's The Tower (1993), Paul Laffoley's The Allegory Of The Cave, The Line, And the Sun (1991), and Chris Hipkiss's An Isolation: A Worrying Reason To See Me (1995), while the binary opposition of the secular and sacred can be found in works which cut across stylistic differences and mediums and is perhaps so succinctly expressed in the untitled drawing of Leonid Purygin. Time's passing is directly addressed in the sculptures of Bruce Conner and George Herms, while ecological destruction is central to Walton Ford's painting, A Guilty Cock #1 (1994). Finally, in the work of Joseph Cornell, James Lloyd, Adolf Wolfli, Martin Ramirez, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, and Joseph Yoakum, the viewer encounters self-contained worlds which work in vigorous opposition to the one we routinely inhabit. These worlds challenge our notions of what constitutes the real. The work in this exhibition articulates this in many diverse and provocative ways, all of which probes the visible in pursuit of the invisible.

e are forever on the brink of the apocalypse. This is what our contemporary age shares with the Middle Ages, the recognition that peace and harmony, such as they exist, are only temporary, that something horrible and unexpected can occur at any moment, whether to an individual, a community, a nation, or the world. The coming of the end of the world is announced periodically in supermarket tabloids, while the end of a way of life is lamented by many politicians. Time's passing deeply affects us all. However, to recognize that one is caught in time is a fact nearly everyone tries to avoid confronting.

So how is it then, after the political leaders fail us, and the fast-talking evangelists leave us with broken spirits and suitcases filled with doubts, that the work of the people in this exhibition can actually heal in the face of the apocalypse. After all, they are only artists, and at that, their work is not so easy to recognize as beautiful.

In the first "Duino Elegy," Rilke asked who would hear him if he called out. He knew that in order to truly recognize beauty, one had to also acknowledge the existence of terror. It is this duality that is inherent in the works in this exhibition. It is a duality which is central to our perceptions, whether we recognize it or not. These artists believe there is more to the world than the eye can see. The proof they offer us, "a terrible beauty" as Yeats called it, is in their art.