Issue date: 10/14/04 Section: Arts

Paul Laffoley's first years of life were spent in silence; he was diagnosed slightly autistic at the age of four.

It was in this silence that he began to draw and paint.

In his senior year at Brown University he was given electric-shock treatments.

Despite being declined by the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Laffoley managed to become the apprentice to sculptor Mirko Baseldella before heading to New York to apprentice with architect Frederick Kiesler

In 1968 Laffoley moved into his own studio apartment in Manhattan and founded the creative unit called the Boston Visionary Cell.

The mission of this organization (consisting of mostly of Neo-Platonic artists) is promoting visionary art in the Boston area.

Their spiritual leader was the late Teilhard De Chardin. Participants of the BVC believe in a mystical explanation for the universe and that visionary sensibility is on the rise again and will be a necessity in the future.

Today, Laffoley supports himself with a job at the Boston Museum of Science while the rest of his time is dedicated to the BVC.

There, he works on the multimedia renderings of his visions of alternative futures and convoluted idealisms.

During a routine CAT-scan of his head in 1992, a miniature metallic implant was found in the occipital lobe of his brain (near the pineal gland).

Local M.U.F.O.N. investigators declared it to be an alien nano-technological laboratory.

Laffoley has come to believe that this implant was of extraterrestrial origin and made it the main motivation behind his theories.

Like many heralds of doom, Paul Laffoley has spent a lot of his life within mental institutions.

Yet, his artwork is extremely thought provoking, full of detailed pseudo-scientific connotations.

He has been featured in more than 40 exhibitions and several books, including Paul Laffoley: The Phenomenology of Revelation and In Pursuit of the Invisible.

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