FMPU Artist of the Week: Paul Laffoley — Blueprints for the Impossible
I make images with AI that occasionally wander into Paul Laffoley territory: impossible diagrams, metaphysical machinery, cosmic schematics, information systems that seem to have arrived without their instruction manuals. And I never knew who Laffoley was and what he means to today's artistic landscapes. Then I look at an actual Laffoley. And there is the difference. Paul Laffoley wasn't asking a machine to imagine complexity. He spent decades constructing his own visual language for it. The symmetry, lettering, architecture, geometry and almost pathological accumulation of information were components of a private system that he developed canvas by canvas. The man put in the miles. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1935, Laffoley studied classics and art history at Brown University before studying architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Architecture wasn't incidental to what followed. According to his estate, he believed architectural training could sha...