Paul Laffoley

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Paul Laffoley
Paul Laffoley in his studio, January 2015.jpg
Portrait of Paul Laffoley in his studio by Elyse Harary [January 2015]
Born August 14, 1935
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Died November 16, 2015 (aged 80)
Boston, Massachusetts
Nationality American
Movement Visionary Art
Website http://paullaffoley.net

Paul Laffoley (August 14, 1935 – November 16, 2015) was an American visionary artist and architect from Boston, Massachusetts, represented by Kent Fine Art in New York.

About[edit]

Following his formal education in the classics at Brown 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, he went to New York in 1963 to work with the visionary artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, and was also recruited to view late-night TV for Andy Warhol in exchange for a place to sleep. Weekdays, Laffoley found employment with Emery Roth & Sons where he worked on the plans for the yet to be built World Trade Center Towers before being terminated upon his suggestion of bridges joining the two buildings.

At that time, Laffoley had been painting in the basement of his family home in Belmont on the weekends, completing his first fully mature vision: The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. 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 late night television. This quickly developed into four general subcategories of paintings: Operating Systems, Psychotronic Devices, Meta-Energy, Time travel, and Lucid Dreaming. Conceived of as “structured singularities”, Laffoley never works in series, but rather approaches each project as a unique schematic. Working in a solitary lifestyle, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas would take up to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980’s, Laffoley becan to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging Psychotronic device, a modern approach to trans-disciplinary enlightment and its spiritual aura.

From an early age, Laffoley manifested an obsessive interest in UFO's. He has seen the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still 873 times. He explains that his obsessive interest in the film derives partly from a fascination with the architecture of the space ship in the film which, early on in his life, was subconscious. While he was still a child he made a vow to become an architect so that he could design flying saucers, although he did not become a registered architect until he was 50 years of age. "Two years later, in preparation for a major oral surgery, I was subjected to a routine cat-scan of my head. As a result, a miniature metallic-like "implant" was discovered in my brain near the pineal gland. A local chapter of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) declared it to be a 'nanotechnological laboratory' capable of accelerating or retarding my brain activity. I have come to believe that the implant is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation of my ideas and theories."[1]

Biography[edit]

Paul Laffoley was born on August 14, 1935 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.[2] Laffoley has written that, while at Brown for his undergrad in 1961, he was given eight electroshock treatments after the termination of "about a year of weekly sessions with a psychiatrist, who had treated me for a mild state of catatonia."[3]

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.

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.

After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Laffoley was one of a number of architects who, in 2002, submitted designs for the competition to plan the Freedom Tower. Laffoley took his inspiration from the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. His conception was to plan a gigantic hotel in the style of Gaudí's Sagrada Família church in Barcelona.[4][5]

Works[edit]

Painted on large canvases, the majority of Paul Laffoley's paintings combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.[6][7][8] As of 2010, Laffoley claims to have executed over 250 works currently being compiled in a catalogue raisonne by Douglas Walla. The archive will include "thought-forms" for each work where available as composed by the artist.

A portion of this archive, and Laffoley’s writings, are scheduled to be published in late 2015 by the University of Chicago Press in a new book entitled THE ESSENTIAL PAUL LAFFOLEY edited by Douglas Walla, with further texts by Linda Dalywimple Henderson, Arielle Saiber and Steven Moskowitz.

British writer Michael Bracewell, in his collection of essays entitled 'When Surface was Depth' observed: "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." Bracewell has also written that, "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."[9]

Paul Laffoley is represented by Kent Fine Art in New York.[10]

Death[edit]

Laffoley died on November 16, 2015 in South Boston, Massachusetts, of congestive heart failure.[11]

Exhibitions[edit]

Major works[edit]

  • The Kali-Yuga: the End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. (1965)
  • The Cosmos Falls into the Chaos as Shakti Urborosi: The Elimination of Value Systems by Spectrum Analysis (1965)
  • The World Self (1967)
  • I, Robur, Master of the World (1968)[16]
  • "The Visionary Point" (1970)
  • Utopia: The Suspension between the Possible and the Impossible (1973)
  • Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe (1974)
  • Temporality: The Great Within of the Universe (1974)
  • Get Thee Behind Me, Satan (1974–1983)
  • Black-White Hole: the Force of the History of the Universe to Produce Total Non-Existence(1976)
  • Cosmolux (1981)
  • The Orgone Motor (1982)
  • Color Breathing (1983)
  • Thanaton III (1989)
  • Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth (1990)
  • It Came From Beneath Space: Lucid Dream Number 52 (1991)
  • The Solitron (1997)
  • Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate (1999)[17]
  • After Gaudi: A Grand Hotel for New York City (2002)
  • Pickman's Mephitic Models (2004)
  • The Myth of the Zeit-Geist (2013)

Books and monographs[edit]

  • Laffoley, Paul, and Jeanne M. Wasilik. "The Phenomenology of Revelation". New York: Kent Fine Art, 1989. ISBN 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 978-3863350888 (catalog)
  • Croquer, Luis. (2013) "Paul Laffoley: Premonitions of the Bauharoque". Seattle: Henry Art Gallery. ISBN 978-0-935558-52-4


Interviews[edit]

  • The Viking Youth Power Hour interview Paul at the Esozone, August 11, 2007 [18]
  • 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:[19]
  • 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

References[edit]

  1. ^ Laffoley, Paul (2000). "Disco Volante" from the UFO Show. Normal, IL: University Galleries, Illinois State University. pp. 34, 36, 24–27. ISBN 0-945558-30-9. 
  2. ^ "Paul Laffoley Bio". Kent Fine Arts LLC. Retrieved 12 October 2013. 
  3. ^ Lafolley, Paul (1989). "The Dream As The Initiation" from The Phenomenology of Revelation. New York, NY: Kent Fine Arts. p. 15. ISBN 1878607057. 
  4. ^ Collins, Glenn (January 21, 2003). "Postmodern, In a Manner Of Speaking; A Shape Out of 1908 Is Offered Downtown". New York Times. Retrieved 13 October 2013. 
  5. ^ Larroque, Jean-Pierre. "The Mad One". Doublethink Productions. Retrieved 13 October 2013. 
  6. ^ Outsider Art Sourcebook. New York, NY: Raw Vision. March 2009. ISBN 978-0954339326. 
  7. ^ Johnson, Ken (17 January 2013). "The Boston Visionary Cell". New York Times. Retrieved 12 October 2013. 
  8. ^ Johnson, Ken (April 6, 2001). "ART IN REVIEW: Paul Laffoley, 'Portaling'". New York Times. Retrieved 13 October 2013. 
  9. ^ Bracewell, Michael (July 9, 2002). when surface was depth. London: Da Capo Press. pp. 346–353. ISBN 0306811308. 
  10. ^ Paul Laffoley Artist Page
  11. ^ "VISIONARY ARTIST AND GENIUS PAUL LAFFOLEY HAS DIED". Dangerous Minds. Retrieved 17 November 2015. 
  12. ^ Kent Fine Art
  13. ^ "Chasing Napoleon". e-flux. 2009-09-25. Retrieved 2014-06-02. 
  14. ^ Paul Laffoley: The Boston Visionary Cell. New York: Kent Fine Art, 2013
  15. ^ Paul Laffoley at the Henry Art Gallery April 6 - September 29, 2013
  16. ^ Laffoley, Paul (1999) [1968]. "I, Robur, Master of the World" from Architectonic Thought-Forms. Austin, TX: Austin Museum of Art. pp. 46–47. ISBN 0-9670952-1-2.  Paul Laffoley: "As we approach the twenty-first century, problems of managing the world seem to be emerging faster than we are able to solve them. Driven close to despair and distraction, architects and other designers of the environment have become either bricoleurs, frantically trying to patch our reality as it comes apart at the seams, or prophets of doom traumatized by their own foreboding. As inall problem solving, the solution lies first in determining the next higher context of the elements involved, and second, in assessing the new possibilities that then appear. In the case of the earth, the next design context is the solar system, specifically our nearest neighbor both physically and mythologically--the moon. Therefore I propose an earth moon link-up through an open space to form a simple but gigantic motor."
  17. ^ Laffoley, Paul. "Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate". Retrieved 3 November 2013. 
  18. ^ http://www.thefeedlot.org/vikingyouth/show_show.php?show=95
  19. ^ http://www.mikehagan.com/2012/mp3/021207_PAUL_LAFFOLEY.mp3

External links[edit]

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