1514582330Paul Laffoley19352015Paul 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). PaulLaffoleyhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4881/fullPaul Laffoley’s fascination with art commenced in secondary school. From his Greek and Roman studies, he learned the inherent possibilities in diagrammatic structures; making information more comprehensible through outlines and developing systems were two of these possibilities. Laffoley remained essentially self-taught until he received two apprenticeships. The first apprenticeship was with sculptor Mirko Basaldella, who Laffoley met while enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After being kicked out of Harvard for having “deviant ideas,” Laffoley moved to New York City in 1962, and obtained a second apprenticeship with the visionary artist and architect Frederick Kiesler. Laffoley was looking for work and met Andy Warhol, who allowed him to stay at his firehouse studio in exchange for watching late-night television test patterns. The test patterns led Laffoley to look at religious mandalas, the Hindu and Buddhist cosmic diagrams, which he would adapt to use as the main compositional structure for most of his paintings. Then he began to pursue the visionary genre. In 1971, he founded the Boston Visionary Cell. Although mostly known for his paintings, he also created sculptures, developed architectural projects, originated inventions, and wrote extensively. His relationship to writing was found to be far more dynamic and voluminous after his death in 2015, when a vast trove of notes and unpublished manuscripts was discovered in his studio. These texts include plays, critical writings, treatises, architectural proposals, outlines for lectures, autobiographical writings, and philosophical essays.As a transdisciplinary artist, Laffoley used writing as a tool for various purposes. His texts explore recurrent topics such as alchemy and utopia, themes consistently developed in his artworks. His “thought-forms” accompany his paintings and are used as a tool to decode symbols and elucidate content. He also wrote complete books, including The Principles of Alchemy (1972) and The Levogyre (1976–1990). The topics of these major textual works reappear as subjects in various later paintings and manuscripts. Laffoley explained that, within each one of his paintings, there are at least fifty other paintings.Laffoley’s art has a visionary purpose: it seeks oneness. His oeuvre’s symbols, forms, and content all refer to a connection with time through “the eternal now” of the past, the present, and the future. Although many discontinuities are experienced in the history of the physical universe, Laffoley restores continuity by illustrating that the physical and the metaphysical aspects of the universe are one. Alchemy allows the perfect method to communicate this oneness.Elyse Benenson, “Paul Laffoley. Thought-Forms: Diagrams for a Vernacular Language,” in Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic, ed. Valérie Rousseau (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2018).(1935–2015)BostonCambridgeBostonCambridgeBostonCambridgePaul George Laffoley Jr.Paul Laffoley