Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley
Born	August 14, 1940 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Movement	visionary art
Website	http://paullaffoley.net

Paul Laffoley (born August 14, 1940) Following a formal education from Brown in the classics, and architectural studies at Harvard, Laffoley would begin to assimilate and systematically cross-pollinate his related strands of intellectual inquiry. In a search for expanded opportunities, Laffoley came to New York to work with the visionary Frederick Kiesler, and was recruited for viewing late night TV for Andy Warhol. At that time, Laffoley had been painting in the basement of his family’s home on the weekends in Belmont, Massachusetts, completing what may be his first fully mature vision: The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. (The Cosmos Falls into the Chaos as the Shakti Oroboros Leads to the Elimination of all Value Systems by Spectrum Analysis), 1965. From this point forward, Laffoley began to formulate his unique trans-disciplinary approach to a new discipline combining philosophy, science, architecture and spirituality to the practice of painting. Laffoley first began to organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas, partially inspired by the late night patterns he watched for Warhol on sixties late night television. This quickly developed into four general subgroups of works: Operating Systems, Meta-Energy, Time Travel, and Lucid Dreams. Conceived of as “structured singularities”, Laffoley never worked in series, but rather approached each project as a unique construct. Working in a solitary lifestyle, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas would take one to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980’s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, and evolved to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging Psychotronic devices, a modern approach to trans-disciplinary enlightenment and its spiritual aura.

Biography

Paul Laffoley was born on August 14, 1940 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to an Irish Catholic family. His father, Paul Laffoley, Sr., the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, was also a lawyer and taught classes at Harvard Business School. Early in life, Laffoley, Sr. also did on-stage performances as a medium.

According to Laffoley, he attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his draftsman's talent was ridiculed by his abstract expressionist teachers. After attending Boston public schools for a short time, Laffoley matriculated at Brown University, graduating in 1962 with honors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History. Laffoley has written that, in his senior year at Brown, he was given eight electroshock treatments.

In 1963, he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and apprenticed with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella before being dismissed from the institution. In a search for expanded opportunities, Laffoley came to New York to work with the visionary Frederick Kiesler, and was recruited by Andy Warhol, who wanted someone to watch television for him at all hours of the night. Laffoley watched television in the pre-dawn hours, before programming had actually begun. Following his dismissal by Kiesler, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center Tower II (floors 15 to 45) with Emery Roth & Sons under the direction of architect Minoru Yamasaki. Following his suggestion that bridges be constructed between the two towers for safety, he was summarily fired by Yamasaki and returned to Boston.

Returning to Belmont in 1965, he completed the first paintings of a mature style in the household basement against the wishes of his father. In Christmas, 1968, after a quarrel with a first studio partner, Laffoley was in immediate need of a studio and living accommodations. Having only one day to relocate, Paul found an empty room on the second floor of a downtown office building at 36 Bromfield Street in downtown Boston, and immediately moved into it. This studio would become infamously known as the Boston Visionary Cell. The Cell was formally incorporated in 1971 as a non-profit art association encouraging art and architecture of the visionary art genre.

Now clearly following his path as a painter, he began a highly original approach to the construction of the painted surface. Based on extensive hand written journals documenting his research, diagrams, and footnoted predecessors to various theoretical developments, Laffoley began to first organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas that had captivated his interest in the spiritual. This format quickly developed into Laffoley’s three sub-groupings of work: operating Systems, psychotronic devices and lucid dreams related to them. Conceived of as “structured singularities”, Laffoley never works in series, but rather approached each project freshly, and individually.

Working in a solitary manner, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas can take one to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, and evolved to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging psychotronic device, perhaps similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge or the Cathedral of Notre Dame and their spiritual aura. As a confirmed “utopian”, Laffoley is a prominent visionary artist.

Since 1966 to the present, Laffoley has exhibited on a regular basis now totaling over two hundred shows including the Ward-Nasse Gallery until 1984, then with the Stux Gallery (Boston/New York) in 1985, and since 1988 at Kent Fine Art, New York. In 1989, Kent Fine Art compiled and published the first monograph on Laffoley entitled The Phenomenology of Revelation. Laffoley also obtained his formal Architectural License in October 1990. His first museum retrospective was in 1999 resulting in the publication of the second Laffoley monograph entitled Architectonic Thought-Forms: Gedankenexperiemente in Zombie Aesthetics: A Survey of the Visionary Art of Paul Laffoley Spanning Four Decades, 1967–1999, to the Brink of the Bauharoque. Other significant survey exhibitions featuring Laffoley's work include the Palais de Tokyo (2009) and most recently Secret Universe II: Paul Laffoley curated by Claudia Dichter and Udo Kittleman for the Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin.

Works

As of 2010, Laffoley claims to have executed over 250 works currently being documented in an upcoming catalogue raisonne by Douglas Walla. The archive will include thoughtforms for each work where available as composed by the artist. Laffoley has called his work a blend of the purely rational, Apollonian impulse and the purely emotional, Dionysian impulse.

British writer Michael Bracewell, in his collection of essays, when surface was depth, has made some particularly eloquent observations about his work, such as:

"If Laffoley's work within the Boston Visionary Cell can be said to have one principal preoccupation - a common denominator of his eclectic scholarship and practice - then that preoccupation would be to understand the process by which one goes from becoming to being."

And:

"The Boston Visionary Cell, as a concretized manifestation of its inhabitant's work and preoccupations, describes the way in which a chaos of data - no less than a chaos of marble - can be sculpted by research to release the perfect forms within it."

He works in many types of media, including oil, acrylic, silkscreen, and pen and ink, and include both images and text. Lately he has concentrated on large paintings with sculptural and mixed media elements.

Laffoley is represented by Kent Fine Art in New York.

Further reading

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Major works

• The Cosmos Falls into the Chaos as Shakti Urborosi: The Elimination of Value Systems by Spectrum Analysis(1965)
• Utopia: The Suspension between the Possible and the Impossible (1973)
• Get Thee Behind Me, Satan (1974–1983)
• Temporality: The Great Within of the Universe (1974)
• Black-White Hole: the Force of the History of the Universe to Produce Total Non-Existence(1976)
• The Orgone Motor (1982)
• Color Breathing (1983)
• Thanaton III: Extraterrestrial Communication Portal (1989)
• Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth (1990)
• It Came From Beneath Space: Lucid Dream Number 52 (1991)
• The Alchemy of Breathing (1992)
• The Fetal Dream of Life into Death (2001–02)
• After Gaudi: A Grand Hotel for New York City (2002)
• Pickman's Mephitic Models (2004)
• The Physically Alive Structured Environment: The Bauharoque (2004)
• Cosmogenesis To Christogenesis (2005)

Books and monographs

• Laffoley, P. (1989). Paul Laffoley: The Phenomenology of Revelation. Boston: Kent Fine Art. ISBN-13: 978-1878607058
• Laffoley, P. (1999). Architectonic Thought Forms: a Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley 1967-1999. Austin, TX: Austin Museum of Fine Art.
• Paul Laffoley: Secret Universe. Walther König, Köln, 2012. ISBN-13: 978-3863350888 (catalog)

Interviews

• The Viking Youth Power Hour interview Paul at the Esozone, August 11, 2007 [1]
• 2007 Feb 12th. 3 hour interview on Mike Hagan's "RadiOrbit" show. Very broad range of topics covered including Laffoley's early life, working on the World Trade Center in the 1970s, developing his time travel theories, the Raelians, Buckminster Fuller, nanotechnology, living architecture and 2012. Link to archived MP3 stream of full 3 hour interview: [2]
• 2001 Thanaton III produced for Channel 4. (original broadcast January 28, 2001. Interviewed by Richard Metzger)
• 1999 Pseudo.com Online Network interview with Richard Metzger of The Disinformation Company
• 1998 The Mystery of Genius (two part series) for the Arts & Entertainment Channel produced by Robert Fiveson. (broadcast in 1999). interviewed by John Metherell
• 1997 Paul Laffoley on the Time Machine, Strange Universe (original broadcast September 10, 1997). interviewed by Alisyn Camerota
• Kossy, Donna. "Paul Laffoley: Third Generation Lunatic Fringe" in Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001 (2nd ed. exp. from 1994), ISBN 978-0-922915-67-5 (interview reprinted from Kooks Magazine, No. 6, 1990, p. 20–28)

External links

• Laffoley's Odyssey, created by Rustbelt Films and Topsy Turvy Productions, producers of a documentary titled Laffoley's Odyssey
• Official Paul Laffoley site contains links to all activities
• Kent Fine Art - Paul Laffoley's art gallery
• Interview with Laffoley (focusing on H. P. Lovecraft, the nature of evil and many other topics)
• Article about synchronistic events relating to Paul Laffoley's leg-breaking fall in 2001