HR Giger, the Swiss artist who innovated the lexicon of conceptual design for Hollywood films, has died today. He was 74.

The preternatural visions that live on have been germinating, serpentine, for the last 35 years in a cinephiliac collective unconscious.  One can say the artist’s work was an artificial channel for conducting nightmares – a sluiceway for purgatorial hallucinations.

Rendered in oily liquids of deep onyx and industrial grays, the works often depict unsettling biological entities imbued with a sophisticated structural quality as well as organic components. Others are post-apocalyptic dreamscapes that call to mind the more grotesque reveries of a Hieronymos Bosch.

Few conceptual artists stand before him.  The artist’s richly textured design sensibility raised the bar for a certain brand of cinema unquestionably. Perhaps he contributed his most visible creations to the Alien films, for which he was awarded an Oscar.  The accomplishments on these movies are elegantly precise, disquieting, enduring. His work will be remembered just the same.