You wonder what it was he was seeing in that moment, that kid from Harvard, zooming on acid, rocketing along through the astral realms of his own mind. It's 1968 and the world's gone mad, all the Structures are breaking down, and King's dead, and the Kennedys, too, and the spectral faces of soldiers gaze from newsstands. In the ecstasy and agony of his trip, the kid hears rumors of some paintings over at a gallery on Landsdowne Street in Boston, big mandala-like pieces, six feet around, wild with color but rendered with monastic precision, depicting maps of hard-to-map things: The Ultimate Quest and The Basic Forces and The Levels of Being. The paintings point to big, archetypal matters—the meaning of life, the future of humanity—and it's all there, on the canvas. But sorting it out is a hard trick, even when the answers seem to be written into the paint itself, in neat little letters—“at night time we are all alone together,” “technology will equal morality,” “the goal of the universe is self-awareness; awareness itself is ultimately destructive”—all these oracular notions, which, even if you can't quite grasp their meaning, convey the sense that the guy who painted this stuff, Paul Laffoley, he's got his head wrapped around something Enormous, he's plugged in. They're hypnotic, these mandalas, and the Harvard kid just stares, goggle-eyed, until something breaks loose inside his mind, he sees through the whole thing, and he freaks. Out of fear or compassion or revulsion, who knows which, he scrawls a warning, polite but imploring, in red ink on the wall: “Don’t look at this painting.”

If you could, you’d like to question that kid now, in his unmoored state, before he runs out of the gallery and back into the bright, anonymous Boston streets of 1968. You’d like to ask him, What did you see in there? And did you find Truth on the canvas? Was that what sent your mind reeling? Or was it Delusion cutting a dark shadow across your high? You would like to ask this because it seems that in the paintings of this man, Paul Laffoley, each possibility could be present—truth and delusion, reality and fantasy, vision and phantasm. And if you look at his work long enough, if you stand there and stare and really try to sort it out, you might get a glimpse of what it means for these categories themselves to dissolve. You might find yourself wondering: Is he crazy? Or am I?

Related Links:
Kent Gallery, Ny : http://www.kentgallery.com/artists/laffoley_key_01.html