Some might think that Los Angeles - its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. "Epiphany I (Adoration of a Magi)," a 1996 painting, renders the infant - interpreted both as Hitler and Christ - as being visited by not three men but five, in S.S. uniforms. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane." The visceral reactions, he's come to realize, have as much to do with what's already in the viewers head as what he's created. "It's not my piece of canvas with tiny fractions of pigment," he explains. "The . . . art . . . has the potential of putting that finger on the spot, and it can trigger something that you'd rather not like to look at. But it's [already] in your own mind. That's what I think art can do."