Remembering Paul Laffoley on his 89th birthday

Remembering Paul Laffoley on his 89th birthday

Today would have been the 89th birthday of my good friend, the brilliant artist and thinker Paul Laffoley. It has been nearly a decade since Paul died, and the world is a much less interesting place without him. There are so many visual reminders of him in our house, including an extraordinary horoscope he drew for me in tiny handwriting that hangs in my office, that I am almost always thinking about him. Not necessarily consciously to him, but he is still there in my everyday life. Knowing Paul was one of the best experiences of my life.

William Alderick wrote a great essay about Paul on his Substack that I would like to draw your attention to:

My first encounter with US artist Paul Laffoley in 2004 at a disinformation weekend in upstate New York left an indelible impression on me. Somewhere between Buddha and Doc Brown from Back to the Future, Laffoley presented a slideshow of his work and, with a lion’s paw in place of his left foot, gave a lecture on his various theoretical topics, including alternative histories, blueprints for the future development of humanity, Goethe’s primordial plant transformed into genetically modified living architecture, and his design for a functioning time machine. As collector Norman Dolph puts it in his foreword to Laffoley’s book The Phenomenology of Revelation, Laffoley could be the “language painter of a consciousness yet unborn.”

The problem is that the ideas presented in Laffoley’s science fiction visions are so far removed from established reality as to be, by definition, insane. His mandalic architectural blueprints of metaphysical ideas regularly pay homage to and draw on such a diverse range of intellectual ingredients that no single person can be able to properly evaluate them all: Plato, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Madame Blavatsky, P. D. Ouspensky, Nikola Tesla, H. G. Wells, Claude Bragdon, R. Buckminster-Fuller and Teilard de Chardin, to name just a very small and under-representative selection. Much of the lack of attention Laffoley receives within the mainstream art industry is due to this. Richard Metzger, host of “Disinformation,” muses that Laffoley’s “unique scholarship” and his interdisciplinary autodidacticism—which he is almost entirely self-taught and thus free from academic compartmentalization and categorization—are so far beyond most people’s grasp that he is misunderstood to the point of tragicomedy.

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