Paul Laffoley: The Sixties

Utilizing an architecturally informed, highly graphic and diagramatical process the artist creates what he refers to as "taking cosmic themes and turning them into highly detailed earthworks". Eachpainting, which can take up to 3 years to create, takes the viewer deep on a journey through the complexity of his visions, detailing abstract theories, futuristic devices and prophetic glimpses into the future where a vegetable house grown from a single bag of seeds in 3 months would solve the world's housing shortage. In another, the definition of time travel is fulfilled by amplifying events of retro-cognition of the past and pre-cognition of the future through a device call a Geochronmechane.

Common themes throughout the artist's work are operating systems, embedded with information and connected in ways not previously considered. Most often the symbolism presented in Paul's work is mediated by a system of text which connects disciplines as diverse as astrology, metaphysics, history, dimensionality, architecture, chemistry and biology to name but a few.

Through the arrangement and presentation within the works, an entirely new worldview unfolds, and one which is further brought into being by experiencing the works themselves. Laffoley considers many of his paintings to be 'psychotronic', or mass - consciousness interactive, meaning that rather than the painting representing an extraneous invention or idea, the painting is the thing itself.

Paul Laffoley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940 and has been working and living in Boston since 1966. Following his graduation from Brown with a degree in the Classics he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1962-1963. After being dismissed for conceptual deviance he apprenticed with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler in New York before returning to Massachusetts in 1965. Later that year he began painting in the style he is known for today in his parents basement in Belmont and in 1968 moved into what would become his home and studio for the next 40 years. This 18 x 30 foot utility room on the second floor of a downtown office building in Boston at 36 Broomfield St. was dubbed the Boston Visionary Cell. It was incorporated in 1971 as a non-profit art association encouraging art and architecture of the visionary genre. Since 1966 Laffoley has shown in over 200 exhibitions as well as four major exhibitions in New York at Kent Gallery entitled Singularities (1989), Portalling (1997), Time Phase X (2005) and Mind Physics (2007). In 1989, Kent Gallery published the first monograph on his work entitled The Phenomenology of Revelation. His second publication, 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 Bauharouque was a result of his first museum retrospective at the Austin Museum of Art in 1999. A catalog raisonne of the artist's complete works is currently in progress.

The Sixties will be on view from November 29 to January 4, 2009. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11-6 and Sunday from 12-5.
The opening reception will be on November 29 from 7-10pm. Paul will also be giving a lecture on his art and life on Sunday November 30 from 5-8pm at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.
For additional information please contact Meiko Kanamoto at 416.955.0500 or email mk@metagallery.com