Paul Laffoley
(1935–2015)
BornCambridge, Massachusetts, United States
DiedBoston, Massachusetts, United States
BiographyPaul Laffoley considered himself an alchemist, mixing science and art to express intangible ideas about the universe. In his cerebral works—in which aphorisms and annotations fill the borders, written with stick-on vinyl letters—kaleidoscopic diagrams give order to complex information about time travel, black holes, alien life, alternate dimensions, astrology, mathematical theories, and the occult. Laffoley described his large square paintings, reminiscent of mandalas and board games, as “architectonic thought forms” intended as portals to knowledge. They were meant not to be viewed but to be interpreted. Each involved years of research and was accompanied by dense handwritten notes. One of his earliest such paintings—The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. (The Cosmos Falls into the Chaos as the Shakti Ouroboros Leads to the Elimination of all Value Systems by Spectrum Analysis) (1965)—represents the end of the universe through references to Hindu cosmology and symbolism about time’s cycles. Laffoley went on to experiment with a range of media and styles in his obsessive pursuit of using art to examine reality and the future, as exemplified by Pickman’s Mephitic Models (2004), a Lovecraftian assemblage made of velvet drapes, photo clippings, and acrylic on linen canvas, along with human thighbones.“I believe that inspiration embodies the idea of being possessed by an entity that is unknowable but whose unknowability passes through oneself in a manner that produces action as a by-product of the passage,” Laffoley wrote in The Phenomenology of Revelation (1989). His curiosity about the unknown was informed by his father, a banker who was passionate about Eastern religions and acted as a psychic medium. Born in 1935 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laffoley studied philosophy, classics, and art history at Brown University and went on to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, although his unconventional ideas cut his time in the program short. During shock treatments for catatonia, he had an experience of lucid dreaming that was pivotal to his interest in the mystical.
Laffoley started the Boston Visionary Cell in 1971 “to develop and advance visionary art,” with a small room in a Boston office building serving as his home, studio, and headquarters. A 1999 retrospective organized by the Austin Museum of Art brought greater attention to his work. In 2001, a fall led to the amputation of his leg below the knee, and he would wear a prosthetic shaped like a lion’s paw for public appearances. He died in 2015.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).