Mind Body Alpha
1989
Oil, acrylic and vinyl lettering on canvas
73 1/2 x 73 1/2 in.

Subject: The concentration of consciousness and mass for the entire Universe.

Symbol Evocation: The position in Space from which everything is related.

SECRET UNIVERSE: PAUL LAFFOLEY
NATIONALGALERIE im HAMBURGER BAHNHOFF, BERLIN
November 3,2011 thru March 4, 2012
Udo Kittelmann & Claudia Dichter
Publication by Verlag der Buchhandlung: Walter Konig.

Where can a secret still exist, if it’s exhibited in the public space of a museum?  Does it lie in what is shown, in the conditions under which it originated, in the effect it has?  It lies in all of the above.  Secret Universe presents individual artistic positions that cannot be branded with any of the labels commonly used in the art world and do not follow a contemporary discourse, yet employ all of the strategies of contemporary art.  With the series, secret universe, Hamburger Bahnhoff-Museum fur Gegenwart-Berlin is opening a project area in the museum’s eastern wing for a period of three years, which will present works of art that give insights into fascinating worlds of potentiality, as well as offering complex visual narratives.

---

Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth
1990
Serigraph in colored inks, with corrections by the artist in colored pencils
Paper: 32 x 32 in. / Image: 28 x 28 in.

Comments: It is now just five years since the centennial celebration of the 1895 publication of the famous novel by H.G. Wells (1866-1946), The Time Machine.  The subject matter of science fiction has long been recognized as a fruitful source of ad hoc research and development.  However, it was not until the mid 1950’s (the period of the beginning of the maturity of our vision of technology) that this recognition became widespread and socially obvious.  The concept of the Time Machine, in short, has been considered by its nature impossible and absurd.

MODELS OF FEASIBILITY
WESTFALISCHER KUNSTVEREIN
8 October – 23 December 2011

The project “Models of Feasibility” comprises an exhibition in the Westfälischer Kunstverein and a seminar at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster and will be accompanied by a series of public lectures. It deals with model designs in art, science and related disciplines. The main focus is on a parallel view with regard to the awareness-forming and productive skills of the respective models of presentation and narration. An attempt will be made to accommodate the differences in the respective technical terminology so that it is not about a dialogue between the different disciplines in the sense of an interdisciplinary approach but much more about the diverse possibilities for describing the world, which are each granted their own claim to truth in equal measures. Through a non-judgemental, parallel consideration of different models, the goal is to allow for greater tolerance of “different” truths, opening up a “dialogue of truths”.

---

Alice Pleasance Liddell
1968
Oil, acrylic, ink, and vinyl lettering on canvas
73 1/2 x 49 1/2 in.

Subject: The Real Alice

Symbol Evocation: The Awakening of Sexuality

ALICE IN WONDERLAND organized by the TATE LIVERPOOL
Tate Liverpool. 4 November 2011 – 29 January 2012
MART, Rovereto . 25 February – 3 June 2012
Kunsthalle Hamburg 30 June – 30 September 2012

Lewis Carroll’s stories based around the figure of Alice are numbered among the most outstanding literary inventions and continue to exert a fascination to this day, having remained artistically original and innovative while retaining their broad appeal . . . Concealed behind the appearance of a children’s book lurks a complex puzzle of references, with flashes of philosophical profundity in the form of entertaining and short-lived episodes. In a playful and intelligible way, Carroll’s stories pose imoortant questions about individuality and self-knowledge, time and space, the relationship between fiction and reality, and history and story telling, as well as the function and authority of language. In this way, Alice and her adventures have become a metaphor for artistic engagement and the quest for meaning per se.

---

Tesseract House
1978
Ink and letraset on board
51 x 33 in.

Subject: The Cosmic Mission of Architecture

Symbol Evocation: The Tesseract as the Key to the Mystery of the Universe

MONDES INVENTES, MONDES HABITES
MUDAM LUXEMBOURG
8 October 2011 – 15 January 2012

Presented in four of the museum’s galleries, this exhibition is concerned with the singularity of worlds created by artists who, in turn thinkers, engineers and architects, question the physical and organic mechanics that constitute our universe and the energetic and vital forces that cross it. The exhibition thus presents a voyage through the work of artists as David Altmejd, Alighiero e Boetti, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Vincent Ganivet, Theo Jansen, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Paul Laffoley, Isa Melsheimer, Miguel Palma, Panamarenko, Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, Nancy Rubins, Conrad Shawcross or Roman Signer.

Khastoo Gallery, Los Angeles
The Alchemy of Things Unknown and a visual transformation on meditation
10 June – 31 July 2010
Khastoo Gallery 7556 West Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90046

This exhibition intends to examine and expose individual works of art in relation to theosophy, sacred tradition and devotional practice. From William Blake’s illuminated works of divine imagination to Carl Gustav Jung’s drawings of collective symbolic unconscious, the visual is undoubtedly an integral creative tool for reaching, exploring, animating and pervading the indefinable spaces beyond body and mind.

Click to view full press release

Austrian Cultural Forum, New York
NineteenEightyFour
27 May – 5 September 2010
Austrian Cultural Forum 11 East 52nd Street New York, NY 10022

This exhibition examines the evolution of imagery and language in what has been described as our panoptic era. While its roots are grounded in the concepts that arose from the 1948 novel by George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which clearly reflected the historical background of totalitarianism, this exhibition attempts to distance itself from this source by considering forms of surveillance and control today, where an all-powerful apparatus as described in Orwell’s work appears overly simplistic. The expansion of the scope of media, both through information technology innovations and connectivity, has shifted the frontier delineating public and private. Stereotypical notions, such as the ubiquitous eye of “Big Brother” and CCTV channels constantly recording the streetscape, seem less relevant as we enter a new age of alienation. It is now as if the objects and ideas we desire control us more deeply than those that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s protagonist Winston Smith feared, and ultimately surrendered to, controlled him. In addition, the acceptability of constant self-exposure entices us into what can be called the “participatory panopticon.” As a result, the artists represented in this exhibition, all of whom live and work in Europe and the United States, continue to question the effects of surveillance systems on the subject, but also the possible subversive usage by the subject, in a variety of media – including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation.

Click to view full press release

Knoedler & Company, New York
Wynn Newhouse Award Recipients of 2009: Thomas Kovachevich, Paul Laffoley,
Ralph Mindicino, Edward Shalala
3 June – 30 July 2010
Knoedler & Company 19 East 70th Street
New York, New York 10021

KNOEDLER PROJECT SPACE is pleased to present a group exhibition of the Wynn Newhouse Award recipients of 2009. The Wynn Newhouse Awards program was established in 2006 by the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation. Artist candidates are peer-nominated and then selected by a panel of judges including curators, artists, and other art world professionals. Past judges have included Cheryl Brutvan, Phong Bui, Chuck Close, Donna De Salvo, Dorothea Rockburne, Mark Rosenthal, Patterson Sims, among others. The 2009 recipients form a diverse group, whose work represents installation art, multi-media artworks, hand engraved paintings on Plexiglas, and conceptual paintings.

Wynn Newhouse (b. 1954) died on March 6, 2010. The Wynn Newhouse Awards program will continue through 2012, in his memory.

Click to view full press release

Click here to ORDER POSTER

PALAIS DE TOKYO 2009, 2009
4 color lithograph on acid free gloss paper
39 x 27 in.

Paul has just returned from a wonderful reception to his work at the Palais de Tokyo.  He was very grateful for the outstanding collaboration with Marc-Olivier Wahler, Julien Fronsacq, along with an incredibly enthusiastic staff.

While in Paris Paul was able to consummate two dreams: First, to travel to the top of the Eiffel Tower and second, to visit his beloved Gargoyle at the top of Notre Dame.

The Parturient Blessed Morality of Physiological Dimensionality: Aleph-Null Number

2004

Lithograph, Edition of 75

Image Size:           16 x 23 in.

Paper Size:            17 7/8 x 24 7/8 in.

Visit:

KENT Gallery, New York – www.kentgallery.com

META Gallery, Toronto – www.metagallery.com

 

Comments by the artist:

Bernard Riemann [ 1826-1866 ] student of Carl Friedrich Gauss [ 1777-1855 ] developed what we currently call dimensionality. Since dimensionality in the generic sense means the range over which, or to the degree to which any entification manifests itself, it often became further defined as a series contextual propositions. In other words it is a language which Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951] considered a weltanschuung or worldview, an idea that was eventually fleshed out by Benjamin Lee Whorf. But these ideas have kept dimensionality well within the scope of practical science in which one paradigm becomes either parasitic to or subsumptive of all other paradigms.

The person who moved dimensionality away from the iron grip of traditional mathematics and back to the Ancient Greek concept of  Fate, was Georg Cantor [1845-1918], who posing as a mathematician [ a scientist who abhors the concept of infinity in its abstract and concrete manifestations], sought the realm of actual Absolute Infinity – the Aleph-Null Number. This was his search for the living presence of the number of elements in the set of all integers which is the smallest transfinite cardinal number, which goes beyond or surpasses any finite number, group or magnitude.

What Cantor was doing was following the learning process of The Kabbalah, which is a search for God from a base of total materialistic skepticism. One of Cantor’s followers, Kurt Gödel [1909-1963] actually attempted to devise a mathematical proof of the existence of God.

This all leads to the idea that consciousness is embedded within the nature of dimensionality, and that consciousness can not be defined totally as we experience it in our fourth dimensional realm of Time-Solvoid by projecting our definition of consciousness, learned from experience,  onto other more comprehensive and less comprehensive realms.

Consciousness presents itself, therefore, as a family of forms – an octave of intelligence many aspects of which can not be accessed by our human intelligence. But the fact that analogy-cum-metaphor is the operation of the imagination means, even if the transfer of the mind is never complete, that aliveness and deadness are terms relative to a dimensional realm.

Beyond the human realm of Time-Solvoid, the existence and nature of consciousness is often designated as God , gods, demigods, Demons divas, Angels ,souls, heroes , etc. While accepted as part of nature, these entities are rarely understood. Below or less comprehensive than the human realm, consciousness in the form of ghosts, apparitions , shadows or hallucinations are just as distant from human consciousness as members of the so-called divine realm. But the real difference is that most humans feel obviously and naturally superior to these entities. This feeling is often translated into propositions which state that these beings are without any kind of consciousness, and that the attribution of consciousness to them , is what gave rise to the existence of superstition prior to the rise of experimental science. A

science that tried, on the one hand, to discover their true nature, and on the other hand, to dismiss their existence as flim-flam.

The pre-scientific Ancient Egyptian Civilization accepted shadows as having consciousness. Of the nine parts of the Egyptian  personality, two were  about the shadow. The Khaibit (the shadow of the physical body) which never leaves the carcass, and The Ka (the doppelganger) the shadow of the soul that moves freely about the Earth and the stars are interpreted as phenomena such as lucid dreaming or the out-of-the-body-experience in terms of human perception.

While both forms of the shadow are ultimately the same, the dynamic and static forms demonstrate the form of Life-Death of the Shadow.

In today’s world-view, very few people believe that shadows possess a form of consciousness, let alone believe that a human can communicate with one. To most people the shadow is simply the result of solid objects in space blocking the rays of a light source and that is it.

The association of light with consciousness has a history lost in time. But closer to our time James Clerk Maxwell [1831-1879] discovered in 1856 the relation between light and electricity which led eventually to the theory of the electromagnetic spectrum which developed in the early 1930’s. From about 1875 on, the Occult vision of dimensionality, akin to the Pythagorean musical scale of infinite extent, was introduced and supported by Maxwell’s discovery.

Degrees of consciousness, from almost blinding light to almost total darkness, provide the metaphor for Good to Evil, The Divine to The Demonic, Life to Death, all as degrees of embodiment. These are the aspects  of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which include what we call visible light –a very small portion of the spectrum. Most of the spectrum is undetectable by our unaided senses, but nevertheless, it contains octaves of energy which separate themselves into individual dimensions.

Today so-called “physical light” is a metaphor the position of human consciousness within the total dimensional system for two reasons:

(1) “Physical light” always has its origin in the Past, whether or not that origin is a star or a candle;

(2) The “brilliance” that we associate with light exists in Nature only in the minds of intelligent conscious life-forms, and is not  inherent in the non-conscious aspects of Nature. The photons which deliver energy to waiting retinae do not “carry” light. If it was the case that they do, the entire Universe would be “lit up” all of the time  in an isotropic and homogeneous manner, and there would be no “darkness” in the Sky.

 

The symbol for the velocity light has been in our contemporary world the letter “C” meaning 299,796 + or – 4 km./ sec. in a vacuum near the Earth , or in the open air. But now astrophysicists are discovering there is a type of space which can not be monitored by any aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the space where an old star goes when it explodes and dies. This space is distinct from the space of a Black Hole, only in the sense that the Black Hole space is an infinitesimal point of that , space infinite in extent, which acts as the background energy plenum of the Universe.

On Earth these same astrophysicists have discovered a way of slowing down the  speed of light to 17 mph by changes of media. They expect very soon to have light to travel at 4 mph. Then everyone will be able to interact directly with light, even the blind , because the  energy of the electromagnetic spectrum travels in the human brain at 700 mph.

According to Philip Gibbs in an article entitled: “The Symbol For The Speed Of Light ? “, he states : “…, it is possible that its use persisted because “C” could stand for “celeritas” and had therefore become a conventional symbol for speed. We can not tell for sure how Drude, Lorentz, Planck or Einstein thought  about their notation, so there can be no definitive answer for what it stood for then.  The only logical answer is that when you use the symbol “C”, it stands for whatever possibility you prefer “.

While there are many physicists who propose an identification between light and consciousness by means of formulae that rival the simplicity and power of Einstein’s famous E = Mc². I prefer, therefore, to use “C’ to stand for consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul has been named as a recipient of the Scientific GOD Prize for his
valuable and tireless work done in the field of visionary arts.

See www.godprize.org

Thank you to Mr. Huping Hu!