His dark, collagelike paintings evoke a psychedelic Disneyland

Artist Fred Tomaselli grew up near Disneyland; as a youngster, he has said, he would crawl out onto his roof so he could ''watch Tinkerbell fly through the night." In many ways, he never left Tinkerbell behind. His paintings are no fairy world, but they do embrace alternate realities and fantastic creatures.

Tomaselli's one-man show ''Monsters of Paradise" comes to The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University starting Thursday. The exhibit was organized by the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Many of the artist's paintings have a Disneyesque sparkle, but it's as if Mickey Mouse has dropped acid. Tomaselli brings a dark, phantasmagoric sensibility to his art. The pieces are minutely detailed, balancing kaleidoscopic spectacle with larger, often disturbing figures, such as a worm with human arms.

The obsessive quality of their construction might seem constrictive on close examination. ''All you can see is an incredible cacophony of things," says Raphaela Platow, acting director of the Rose. But step away and Tomaselli's paintings can explode like fireworks. ''They're dark and luminous, and they have a theatricality to them," says Platow.

The dark edge is partly a result of his generation. Tomaselli, born in 1956, came of age during the post-punk counterculture of late-1970s Los Angeles. The endless possibilities and upbeat ideology of the 1960s and early '70s had crumpled into a more cynical and ironic era. The artist has said he used mushrooms and LSD as a young man. Psychedelia infuses his paintings. Working with layers of resin, Tomaselli embeds pigment, pills, and bits of other things in his pieces.

''He'll cut out gazillions of eyes from magazines to produce an undulating garland," says Platow. ''Dried hashish leaves. An incredible number of pills. His studio is like a cabinet of curiosity."

Whether these works are paintings or collages is a point of debate. But his techniques and materials add up to art that looks so seamlessly put together it could be a painting.

''It's a sleek, shiny surface," says Platow. ''He has encapsulated things at different depths. They appear to start to move. It's almost an Op-Art effect. It can be pretty dizzying. He'll create a pattern from pills and paint. It's confusing to the eye."

The pills are a hallmark, and reiterate the mind-bending imagery that shows up in Tomaselli's work. They've also bought him trouble for using illegal substances to make art. In 1994, he failed to mount a planned exhibit in Paris after customs officials put all his paintings under lock and key. (Pills are in the Brandeis work, but they're not illegal and have caused no problem, according to a museum official.)

Tomaselli has cited Asian art, such as Persian miniatures, as an influence, as well as the Hudson River School. He has an imagination that embraces many versions of reality, from hallucinatory to painterly, from the real world to the Wonderful World of Disney.