Paul Laffoley – Psychotronic Schematics

The Parturient Blessed Morality of Physiological Dimensionality Aleph-Null Number = Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley makes visionary schematic diagrams of metaphysical knowledge systems with incredible complexity. I first encountered his work in Raw Vision – a magazine devoted to Visionary Art and Art Brut. Back then, maybe around 6 or 7 years ago, I couldn’t find a single word on his work let alone a picture, now luckily for black hole eyes, there are many sources to be found on the web – here and here for example.

‘Interested in diagrammatic structures, Paul Laffoley has studied architecture at Harvard and M.I.T. Since the 60s Laffoley has been painting in his downtown Boston studio, exhibiting his work in the Boston area, and writing and speaking on three topics including Dimensionality with relationship to Duchamp, Utopic Space, and research and mapping of the possibility of an idea he developed concerning physically alive architecture by means of grafted vegetation.‘

It seems machines for time travel and perpetual motion are metaphysical motifs recurring throughout Paul Laffoley’s work and these ideas feature in some of my favourite works such as Geochronmechane – The Time Machine from the Earth, Dimensionality – the manifestation of Fate and The Solitron.

An intriguing annotation to The Solitron reads as follows :

‘The Solitron is a design for producing perpetual motion. As an object itself (a painting), the Solitron is in the tradition of American abstract painting, especially similar to the visual structure of the later work of the Adolph Gottlieb. That is, it is a “solid surface” of flat colour that avoids both schematic two-dimensionality and the full three-dimensional spatiality that a free manual touch engenders. Also the design is psychotronic (a mass-consciousness interactive) device, which can be efficacious in a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional modality. The Solitron makes use of the natural motion properties of the correctly generated Solitron wave (which retains its velocity and form during energy encounters) in conjunction with the mass-consciousness unifying capacity of lucid dreaming’

At a distance his work has a computational feel to it, relying on faux three-dimensionality and complex structural schematics that resemble work from a 3D program. What really puts these visionary works in a class of there own however is the hermetic interlinking of complex metaphysical ideas and their respective correspondences. Amazing work.

Finally, for good measure, it is worth mentioning that,

‘During a routine CAT-scan of his head in 1992, a miniature metallic implant, 3/8 of an inch long, was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland. Local M.U.F.O.N. investigators declared it to be an alien nanotechnological laboratory. He has come to believe that the “implant” is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation behind his ideas and theories.’

At present there seems to be just one book on Laffoley’s work in Print, Architectonic Thought Forms: A Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley, 1968 – 1999 – by Paul Laffoley, Elizabeth Ferrer , Jeanne M. Wasilik , J. W. Mahoney