Uncovering the story behind the art

By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent  |  July 1, 2009

Paul Laffoley’s self-portrait at the Cartin Collection at Ars Libri is a hoot and a find. It’s radically different from his colorful visionary blueprints, paintings jammed with mandalas, hieroglyphs, and instructions from spiritual texts, which have gained the artist national recognition.

Painted in 1969, and probably copied from a photograph, this black-and-white image shows a bright-eyed, grinning youth. He has short, brushed-back dark hair and wears a black suit - so black and flat on the canvas, you can’t make out the lapels. He charted the painting over a grid, visible beneath the thin layer of paint on Laffoley’s forehead.

Mickey Cartin, who owns the private collection that has been the source of recent exhibitions at Ars Libri, said in an interview that the Boston-based Laffoley found the canvas at the bottom of a stack of paintings in his studio. For this show, the artist has written text that vividly puts the sweetly buttoned-down figure in context:

“I went to the Woodstock Festival looking like my image in this self-portrait trying to retrieve 18 of my paintings that I believed had been ‘stolen,’ ’’ he writes. “That is probably why I was accused of being a F.B.I. Agent trying to set up a ‘sting’ operation at the festival about ‘drugs.’ ’’ (You can read the full text at www.cartincollection.com/currently.html).

The painting and the story behind it suggest that Laffoley has been out of the mainstream from early on. Although he has a devoted following, he is still an outsider. The self-portrait fascinates as a humble, mildly goofy picture of an artist who has generated bright, deeply complex, and hopeful images of the future - maps toward salvation.

On her website www.unfinishedbridge.blogspot.com, artist Louisa Conrad quotes the poet Greta Wrolstad: “Each/map leaves every valid detail/out, and those who would be the great/cartographers would never draw/a line.’’

Conrad does draw lines, but she’s an intriguing cartographer. In her spare show at anthony greaney, she uses a variety of media to chart and evoke the Mackenzie Delta, an area in the Canadian arctic that oil and gas companies have been exploring for decades.

The show’s centerpieces are two moody, large-scale color photos, shot with film during a boat ride near the Kendall Island Bird Sanctuary and the proposed site of a gas-conditioning facility. These summon the quiet and scope of the environment.

Nearby, two videos run on a loop. One, “Syncrude Processing Plant, Fort McMurray, Alberta’’ is disturbingly gorgeous. Conrad set up her camera to capture this still industrial landscape as day made a heavenly turn to night. Air cannons thump, scaring off water fowl; if birds were to land in the still water fronting the factory, they’d be coated in oil and sink to the bottom.

Conrad also offers a wall full of lovely, delicate drawings of native plants, other photos of the landscape, and a wall drawing in which she traces aerial views of different sections of a proposed pipeline, one over the next; they look like an unruly hank of dry hair, bound at two ends. She titles it after Immanuel Kant: “Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Nothing Entirely Straight Can Be Built.’’

Even approaching the Mackenzie Delta from all these different angles, Conrad has merely skimmed the surface. Still, she conveys the vastness and beauty of the area, and some of how humanity struggles to conquer it.

Every summer, masters degree candidates and post-baccalaureate students at regional art schools mount a sizable juried exhibition at Boston University’s 808 Gallery. This year, more than 70 artists have work up. I go each year, but it takes some fortitude. There’s always a sea of abstract paintings, many of them large-scale. More than half the works are paintings, and only a small fraction of them eye-catching.

Amy Storey does a good job with her ominous, big gouache-on-paper swirling abstraction that centers on a spidery black network and deftly explores space with washes of blue, yellow, and black. Hers, like many of the works, is untitled. Jean-Jacques du Plessis offers an outstanding, if bizarre, narrative painting of late 18th-century excess, with smarmy and livid characters surrounding a dinner table.

Cobie Moules’s absorbing portrait of a young person wearing glasses and a brown hoodie is precisely realist, and adroitly captures the hiding and revelation inherent in good portraiture. Geoffrey Miller’s “Terra Incognita’’ diptych artfully sets a long, abstracted horizontal of scattered fires pluming black smoke over reflection in water below.

Sculptor Susan Freda casts her hands in wax and bronze, breaks the casts, and reassembles the parts into nothing that resembles a hand; the bronze piece looks like fragile forest-floor detritus, and the wax looks miraculously like coral. Sarah B. Peck’s simple but captivating video “Threadbare’’ features candle flames lighting, moving into constellations, and snuffing out; if more was happening, I couldn’t see it because there was too much light in the gallery to properly view video projections.

Despite the slush pile at Boston Young Contemporaries, I’ll keep going back. There’s nothing like the thrill of stumbling over fresh work by a fresh artist.