Paul Fabozzi
Artist’s Statement
These works feature ruled lines and bits of opaque geometry confined within the outlines of sets of shapes culled from photographs I took while walking in New York City. These same shapes featured in Data Walks, my previous series, so they have a history. They originated on the streets of New York and passed though a lens; then they were transformed into paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
Why with my Spectral Variants series do I find it necessary to reconfigure and rearticulate these shapes yet again? Because I feel that this process is bringing me both closer to and farther away from the original walk—farther from the objective qualities of the walk perhaps, but closer to the energy of that experience.
The signs we use—whether linguistic or visual—are arbitrary. Signs do not contain the thing but rather the idea of the thing. I am fighting a battle inside the container of the sign because I want to hold onto the experience itself, not just the idea of it. For me, this is a continuous process of turning experience into signs that can be disintegrated through endless translation.