Paul Laffoley: Time Phase X

July 7 – August 5, 2005

Kent Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by visionary artist Paul Laffoley.The show includes selected paintings, drawings, and prints from 1974 to the present.

In Laffoley’s cosmic historiography, Time Phase X denotes the final phase of Modernism. In the artist’s words, “Time Phase X began on September 11, 2001, and will continue for the next one hundred years. My term for this period is the Bauharoque. It combines the heroic Modernism of the German Bauhaus, with its aspiration toward a technological Utopia, and the exalted theatricality of the Italian Baroque, in which an exuberance of form and illusion serve to express the mystical union of art and life.”

After completing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Brown University, Laffoley studied architecture at Harvard and MIT. In 1963 he moved to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. While in New York he also worked on Minoru Yamasaki’s plans for the Twin Towers. He returned to Boston in 1964, where he has lived and worked ever since. In 1971 he founded the Boston Visionary Cell, an association dedicated to visionary art, still in operation today. For four decades Laffoley has worked toward the actualization of what he calls “Utopic Space” and the realization of a transdisciplinary worldview capable of sustaining human existence into a continuous future.