NEW YORK: Paul Laffoley at Kent

Art in America, Dec, 1998 by Tim Griffin

Paul Laffoley's canvases chart travels through time and space, not to mention certain visitations from alien beings. His works map out psychological territories as darkly idiosyncratic and densely elaborated as those of outsider artists like Henry Darger and A.G. Rizzoli. Yet in an era of pop, X-Files-style paranoia--and of contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney and Toland Grinnell who create elaborate personal universes--Laffoley seems no outsider but genuinely in tune with the times.

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

The most accessible of Laffoley's paintings here was It Came from Beneath Space (1993), which features a giant octopus reaching up its tentacles to the Golden Gate Bridge. Spread throughout the painting are an array of circles containing unusual iconography: a blue 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 seem an endearingly overblown, hallucinogenic dead end--inspired but 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 some of Max Ernst's occultish work, and Laffoley's time-travel diagrams are only a step away from the Russian Constructivists' sculptures based on physics equations. If Laffoley is on the outside, he's looking in the same direction as many insiders.