Paul Laffoley’s diagrammatic paintings, drawings, and box constructions remain firmly outside any of art’s currently fashionable classifications, and they stand little chance of being assimilated into the mainstream. Like the work of the visionary utopians William Blake, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles Ives, Laffoley’s demands to be taken on its own terms. As with the work of all true visionaries, Laffoley’s art has few if any stylistic affinities with his predecessors’. The reason for this is that the visionary genre is not a matter of style but of content.

Rather than evoking or describing,