NEW YORK: Paul Laffoley at Kent - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Paul Laffoley's canvases chart travels from one side time and space, not to mention certain visitations from alien beings. His works map without psychological territories as darkly idiosyncratic and densely elaborated as those of outsider artists like Henry Darger and A.G. Rizzoli. still in an era of clap X-Files-style paranoia--and of contemporary artists similar as Matthew Barney and Toland Grinnell who create elaborate personal universes--Laffoley looks no outsider but genuinely in strain with the times.

This exhibition presented a small number of paintings and drawings from the last decade (Laffoley takes up to 10 years to full his works). The paintings are compartmentalized, offering mingled brightly colored diagrammatic tables filled with hermetic images and writing. Thanaton III (1989) for example, depicts Laffoley standing within a glowing orb of potency (the motif is based upon a photograph of the artist's suppos visitation by dint of extraterrestrials). There is also a single organ of vision at whose sides are indicated places for the "left hand of the past" and the "right hand of the future" The viewer, by dint of positioning his or her hands upon those points while staring into the organ of vision is supposed to learn by what means to bypass the division between life and death. Other works are similarly designed to act as portals to other realities when finally deciphered.

The greatest in quantity accessible of Laffoley's paintings here was It Came from Beneath Space (1993) which features a giant octopus reaching up its tentacles to the of gold Gate Bridge. Spread throughout the painting are an array of circles containing unusual iconography: a cerulean mouse of "fears and worries," a bat of "defensiveness." The entire canvas diagrams what the artist calls a "lucid dream," in which the act of dreaming takes place consciously and supposedly transports the dreamer to a different dimension.

Laffoley's work can look an endearingly overblown, hallucinogenic dead end--inspired on the other hand ultimately ridiculous. Yet his paintings call attention to the fine line that sometimes separates outsider art and this century's avant-garde. Thanaton III recalls a certain quantity of of Max Ernst's occultish work, and Laffoley's time-travel diagrams are single a step away from the Russian Constructivists' plastic arts based on physics equations. If Laffoley is upon the outside, he's looking in the same direction as many insiders.

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