At the top of the stairs to the second floor of the campus University Club, black paper 3-D glasses are stacked on a small table. They are there for the proper viewing of the art. Gesticulating at visitors near some art on a far wall is the artist himself, identifiable by his pair of white paper 3-D glasses, which read faintly in blue along the side “Top Secret.”

“I want people to be able to think that what’s impossible is possible,” said the artist, Jay Fabry, to the group encircling the piece currently being explained.

On Thursday, Sept. 16 Fabry officially opened his art exhibit titled “NeoFracatalist Painting – Beyond Pollock” at the campus University Club. The University Club is more commonly known as the small two-story building where faculty or staff often goes for a salad bar or meatloaf special. What is less familiar, is that artists regularly exhibit their work among its walls. So much so, that the University hired someone to serve as the Club’s curator. The current curator, David Apelt said that four to six artists are showcased here every year.

For this particular artist, Apelt had been on a day trip to Stinson Beach with his wife when he came upon the open studio of Fabry. Fabry had just returned from living in Europe for five years and had opened his home, which also served as his studio to visitors. Fabry said that on an average weekend day he would see 30 to 40 people come in to view his work.

Normally, the artists displayed in the University Club are current or former staff or students. Apelt was so impressed by Fabry’s work, however, that he took the more unusual step of working to get it displayed at the Club even though he had never worked at or attended SF State.

This event is also unusual for Fabry. While he has an open studio for visitors to view his work, this is the first time Fabry is actually putting his art up for sale.

In explaining his art, Fabry tells a tale of Jackson Pollock. According to Fabry, because of the somewhat basic drip techniques of the famous Pollock, art dealers had difficulty recognizing real works from fakes. That was until an industrious graduate student found that Pollock had unknowingly created fractals, or algorithms, in his work through repetitions in his painting technique.

Fabry used this concept of repetition or fractals, mathematical algorithms, in his own work. “I always believed there was a correlation between abstract math and abstract art,” he said.

In addition to these commonly seen repeated segments in his work, Fabry also employed a technique he called ‘sampling’. For this Fabry took already existing art and used it in his own. In one instance, he took digital photographic images of graffiti from the Berlin Wall and applied it to a canvas incorporating it into his own work. In another instance he used a Paris Metro subway poster advertising an upcoming Gaugin exhibit that had been covered in graffiti.

Regardless of the lack of direct connection to the campus, Fabry has offered to donate 10 percent of the money he makes from selling his work to support scholarships in the SF State art department.

“The question is, does it become worth it?” said art department Chair Candace Crockett, who was actually somewhat unfamiliar of Fabry’s intention to donate some of his proceeds to the department.

“The person might be better off just writing a check to a worthy student,” she added, questioning whether Fabry’s real intention was to raise funds for art students or to try and just market his art.

With the exhibit just opening, it remains to be seen how much work will sell. But with about 15 pieces for sale, each ranging in price between $2,500 and $6,500, the art department at most could gain about $5,000.

Still, Fabry maintains, “I want to give something back to the community, something back to the students.” He said that when he was studying photography at the University of Minnesota, 30 to 40 percent of his expenses were covered by scholarships, “and that was very significant, and enabled me to actually complete my degree.”

“And if I’m showing somewhere else,” he said, “I’m still going to give 10 percent of everything I make, sort of a tithe if you want to call it that, back to emerging artists, because it’s really important that they get the opportunity that I had to paint full time.”