*** It is not often you can describe an artist's work as a complete nightmare -- and intend it as a compliment.

For the latest exhibition from Graham Foster -- a massive collection of some 30 paintings -- combines recognisable aspects of Bermuda with the surreal landscapes of a nightmare or the products of a deranged mind.

Foster's self-proclaimed mission was to attempt to portray Bermuda as it has never been seen before.

And his eclectic surrealistic mix -- with dashes of everything from Dada to Dali with a measure of the incoherent organisation of Hieronymus Bosch chucked in -- certainly achieves his object.

His disturbing vision -- made more so by the seemingly random use of the ordinary -- gets beneath the surface of Bermuda and reveals something of the stress of Island life.

For paranoia is evident in Voices in My Head -- a classic symptom of schizophrenia and manic depression, the former being a latter-day diagnosis of Bosch's inspiration.

A huge head rises out the sea -- a recognisably Bermudian coastline at that -- like some giant of myth and legend.

But a doorway and balcony where an ear should be moves from the merely bizarre to the sinister with a dark and conspiratorial figure hunched and whispering into it.

Isolation combines a perfect little Bermuda cottage -- but perched, against the laws of physics on a single slender support rising out of a beach and is reminscent of the Stylites of the early Christian world, who sought to get closer to God, physically and spiritually, by perching atop poles in the desert as an aid to contemplation of the divine.

And Bosch's recurring theme of temptation is echoed in Devil in Disguise, where an almost monastic figure in cassock-like garb examines a watch while a dark and winged figure with just the suggestion of horns looms menacing in the background, as if to suggest it's time to collect.

Attrition shows a blank-eyed two dimensional head rising out of a beach being eaten away from the temple, giving a suggestion of the work of wind and water on the soft coral rock of Bermuda -- unnatural arches, if you like.

His Genie's forked beard brings to mind the crescent of Islam and a powerful-looking out-of-perspective arm looming out of the painting and ending in a fist conjures -- again -- a vague feeling of menace and the frisson of tampering with the unknown.

It all chimes perfectly with the Surrealist ideal, exemplified by their guru, the French poet Lautreamont who wrote "as beautiful as the chance encounter of sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table''.

The lad's work, which he describes himself as setting "a host of bibilical, mythological and fantasy characters and constructions'' against Bermuda's unique coastline and bright light, will not be to everyone's taste.

And perhaps he draws a little too heavily on other artists at the expense of cultivating a more personal view of his world.

He would, however, make a hell of an art forger, I suspect.

But his strangely beautiful -- if sometimes alarming -- insights, do, I think, provide a little window on the less savoury side of living in a small community stuck on a rock in the Atlantic.

RAYMOND HAINEY ART REVIEW REV