When I first walked into Paul Fabozzi’s studio, I was struck by two large panels hanging side by side. An energy reverberated between them as I noticed their relationship. Each was architectural in its essence, geometric, and colorful, comprised of interchangeable shapes and similar compositions; yet every detail that seemed to mimic its counterpart, shifted in color, orientation, and shape. I was transfixed by the investigation of what was similar, what was different, and how. It reminded me how an array of shapes formed by a complex interior will shift in varied ways as I step forward, back, left, or right. Each step creates a different set of shapes, but every viewpoint is a critical piece of the puzzle to my understanding of that space.

In his studio, Paul has laid out materials and tools of all kinds in an orderly fashion, with bushels of color coordinated pencils sitting in jars, and brushes lined up by size. I marveled at it, and he explained how the organization helps him be more intuitive. When he knows where each material, color, and tool is, he can respond to his sense of the next move with more immediacy. I appreciate how the order of his space dismantles the romanticized cliché of disheveled and disorganized artists. Rather than playing that part, Paul sets himself up for success. He says, “I get teased about it all the time, as if it shouldn’t be trusted…it’s interesting, but I’m not that self-conscious about my persona. This is just the way it works.”

One of Paul’s many methods of working is by gleaning imagery from buildings, one being the beloved Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Knowing this, I visited briefly before heading over to his studio. I had been to MOMA many times, but now the space felt new, not only because it was filled with new art, but because his paintings had given me a new lens through which to see it. I wager that these structures, like MOMA, add meaning to the work for many, as it did for me; But Paul’s work is decidedly less about these specific spaces, and more about how we make meaning with our relationship to the world—how these spatial experiences get inside him, rattle around, and fuel an urgency to extrapolate and communicate. Fabozzi isn’t satiated by the consumption of other peoples’ representations of the world. “We can feed off them,” he says “But we still have to torture ourselves by making our own representations of our experience of life”—and he does just that.

Fabozzi brings this lived experience directly back to the studio and aligns his practice parallel to it, so that making the work and viewing it both echo the multi-sensory process of moving through a space. He takes multiple images from a site and works out color and composition with various works on paper as well as digital studies, allowing the shifting process to continue as he grapples with the data and his own memories. He might make fifteen variations before he feels like it’s ready to reference for a larger painting. Contrary to what one might think, his composition is not about appearing accurate, rather it’s dictated by how his body interacts with it through making, how a viewers body might engage with it through looking, how it might feel at a particular scale.

How can a flat surface of geometric shapes feel like it’s moving, breathing, and alive? Paul Fabozzi has done it with translucent and opaque layers that shift and collide. “Seeing is about moving,” says Paul, as he picks up a roll of tape and explains how one might describe that tape as a circle, but in reality its shape is complex and dependent on the constantly changing angles from which we see it; And he’s right. Our world is not flat, yet we often bring it into flat places, like paintings. Fabozzi negotiates the tension between information and experience, between data and memory—a reminder that no matter how hard we try, we cannot flatten our world, that an honest perception is rooted in moving.

Paul Fabozzi maintains a studio in Long Island City, Queens. For more info, visit PaulFabozzi.com or Instagram: paul_fabozzi_studio.