Paul Laffoley

For more than 40 years, the art of Paul Laffoley (born 1940) has synthesized a broad swath of disciplines--from art history, architecture and classical literature to science fiction and natural and occult sciences--offering alternative ways to understand and rethink the world that surrounds us. Laffoley combines diagrams, symbols and texts to create densely layered paintings that take anywhere from one to three years to paint. This sustained and intense focus on both image and content has produced a unique and complex body of work that combines theory and encrypted knowledge with visionary representation. Paul Laffoley: Premonitions of the Bauharoque reproduces in facsimile a series of handwritten journal entries that span Laffoley’s career, alongside color reproductions of the artist’s earliest mature work from 1965. These journal entries, which precede and form the basis of his paintings, explicate Laffoley’s rich cosmology.

The colorfully diagrammatic paintings of Paul Laffoley (born 1940) have won the artist and architect a devout cult following since the mid-1960s. From his one-room apartment in Boston (dubbed by him “the Boston Visionary Cell”), Laffoley has devised complex theories and fantastical scenarios on time travel, the fourth or fifth dimensions and cosmological, scientific and astrological questions, arranging his data in charts, maps and diagrams that combine text and image. These theories--which are first laid out in writing, and then transposed into graphic form--draw on the typologies of Jung and Blake, the theories of Goethe and the architectural writings of Buckminster Fuller and Frederick Kiesler, with whom Laffoley once collaborated. This volume is published in the Hamburger Bahnhof’s new Secret Universe series, dedicated to artists who have gone unnoticed by established art discourses.