For more than 15 years, Paul Fabozzi has walked beneath the elevated train lines around Queensboro Plaza with a camera in hand, watching one of the fastest-changing corners of Queens rearrange itself.
Beginning Sept. 5, the paintings that have come out of those walks go on view in Bayside.
“LIC Morphology,” a solo exhibition of Fabozzi’s work, runs Sept. 5 through 27 at Garage Art Center, at 26-01 Corporal Kennedy St. in Bayside. An opening reception is set for Sept. 5, from 4 to 6 p.m.
Fabozzi is a professor of fine arts and chairman of the Department of Art and Design at St. John’s University, and creative director of Moves: Movimenti Creativi, an artist residency in Lucera, Italy.
The gallery is open by appointment during exhibitions; visits and event RSVPs can be scheduled online at garageartcenter.as.me. More on the artist can be found online at paulfabozzi.com.
The show gathers a series of interrelated oil paintings that take Long Island City as a point of departure without ever settling into a picture of it.
“In ‘LIC Morphology,’ the city becomes both subject and metaphor, a living structure in constant motion,” the Garage Art Center said in a press release.
Rather than reproducing a specific view, Fabozzi draws on an accumulated archive of photographs and impressions of the neighborhood’s architecture, infrastructure and movement.
Geometric passages suggest the elevated tracks, surrounding buildings and changing sightlines of today’s Long Island City while remaining open enough to operate as independent visual structures. Overlapping bands and angular fragments build a network of planes, as though several views of the same intersection had been layered onto a single image.
Color does the spatial work. Saturated reds, greens, yellows and blues overlap and recede to produce depth without conventional perspective.
The canvases on view are simply titled — such as “LIC #1a,” “LIC #1c” and “LIC #1d” — but powerfully show industrial history and architectural energy coexisting in the same pictorial field through oil on canvas.
“My approach to art making has made me feel more deeply the extent to which spatial experience is the basis of perception, and that creating images is a form of making meaning from experience,” Fabozzi said in a statement provided by Garage Art Center.
“My work stakes a claim for the role that image making plays in constructing our conscious relationship to our surroundings and explores our need to establish deep connections to the physical world.”
Garage Art Center also has scheduled an artist talk with Fabozzi, “In Dialogue with Place: On Process and Perception,” for Sept. 19, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public and recommended for those ages 12 and older.