BIO

Following studies at Harvard University and Brown University with honors in classics, philosophy, and architecture, Paul Laffoley came to New York in 1962. He began as a studio assistant to the visionary Frederick Kiesler, and was recruited for late-night TV viewing by Andy Warhol. Following his dismissal by Kiesler, he worked for eighteen months on design for the World Trade Center Towers (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. Returning to his family’s home in Belmont in 1965, he completed the first paintings of a mature style in the household basement, against the wishes of his father. On Christmas Day, 1968, after a quarrel with a first studio partner, he was in immediate need of a studio and living accommodations. Having only one day to relocate, Paul Laffoley found an empty room on the second floor of a downtown office building at 36 Bromfield Street in Boston, and immediately moved in. This studio would be known as the Boston Visionary Cell (formally incorporated in 1971 as a nonprofit art association encouraging art and architecture of the visionary 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 handwritten journals documenting his research, diagrams, and footnoted predecessors to various theoretical developments, Mr. 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 in to his three subgroupings of his work: Operating systems, Psychotronic Devices, and their related Lucid Dreams. Conceiving of them as “structured singularities,” he sometimes works in series, but mostly each project is approached freshly, and individually. Working in a solitary manner, each 73½ x 73½-inch canvas can take one to three years to paint and code.

Since 1966 to the present, Paul Laffoley has exhibited on a regular basis, mounting more than two hundred shows, working with the Ward-Nasse Gallery until 1984, then the Stux Gallery (Boston and New York) in 1985, and since 1988 with the Kent Gallery in New York City. In 1989, the Kent Gallery compiled and published the first monogram on Paul Laffoley, entitled The Phenomenology of Revelation. He also obtained his formal Architectural License in October 1990. His first museum retrospective, in 1999, resulted in the publication of the second Laffoley monograph: Paul Laffoley: Architectonic Thought-Forms: 1967-1999, to the Brink of the Bauharoque. A catalogue raisonné of the artist’s complete works is currently in preparation.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work is the product of the convergence of the instantaneous practice of invention and the slow craft of art

I have always believed that my period of most complete expression and appreciation would be my late future and beyond, in Time Phase X, the final phase of Modernism in the Western world. Time Phase X began on September 11, 2001, and will continue for the next one hundred years. My term for this period is “The Bauharoque.” It combines the heroic Modernism of the German Bauhaus, with its aspiration toward a technological Utopia, and the exalted theatricality of the Italian Baroque, in which an exuberance of form and illusion serve to express the mystical union of art and life.

Photograph by Daniel Dror, courtesy of the artist and Kent Gallery, New York.

Follow this link to Kent Gallery for more information about Paul Laffoley.
 

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