Artist freezes urban landscape in flux

RALEIGH -- It struck Greg Lindquist as he ran an errand in an art supply store and spotted a tube of metallic paint called stainless steel.

The North Carolina native had already been working on landscape paintings influenced by the widespread construction going on in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he now lived. What if he used that paint as a base layer to depict construction beams and steel supports?

"And then, what began as a literal thought first took shape into metallic rivers and then skies," Lindquist says. "With research about the specific histories of these sites, I also became more aware of the conflicting political and social interests in the debates over development and preservation."

Lindquist's musings on decay and growth in Brooklyn formed a gallery exhibition this summer that was reviewed in the national magazines Art in America and Art News, as well as in several New York publications. The show, "Remembrance of Things Present," is currently on exhibit at N.C. State University, his alma mater.

The paintings "freeze time at a moment of imminent change," UNC-Chapel Hill faculty member Cary Levine writes in a brochure accompanying the exhibition. Lindquist begins with a photograph, Photoshops it, projects it onto canvas and paints it, Levine explains.

"Combining the tradition of the industrial landscape with the romanticist veneration of the ruin, Lindquist has transformed the decrepit old factory into an elegy," Levine writes.

Lindquist, 29, is from Wilmington. After graduating from NCSU in 2003, he moved to Brooklyn to attend the Pratt Institute. Although he had been focusing on memorials and monuments in Europe, while in graduate school he saw the environment around him as more relevant and fascinating.

In an e-mail exchange, he says the paintings should resonate with people living in Raleigh, where a new downtown landscape has emerged through the mix of old buildings and newly built restaurants and condos. The Brooklyn works, similarly, capture neighborhoods transformed by globalization and the abandonment of manufacturing warehouses.