From a young age, Oscar Morel exhibited an interest in feeling, touch, and texture. “My mom used to call me Toca Mano — her nickname for ‘touchy’ — because whenever I would walk I’d touch walls or play with plants and get allergic reactions,” he says.

Morel, one of this winter’s visual arts fellows at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, sits on a black stool in his studio. The eight tables surrounding him are piled high with fabric, dried oil paint, canvas, fleece blankets, markers, pastels, respirator masks, and old National Geographic magazines.

A pile of brightly colored fabric shines under a table lamp in a far corner. The fabric is from the Provincetown store MAP. Morel says store employees attended the first FAWC Friday event and told him they had fabric they were not using. They filled a bag the following day and dropped it off for him.

“People give me stuff they don’t like or don’t want anymore, and I reuse it in my own way,” says Morel.

Morel’s work will be on display at the Fine Arts Work Center on Friday, Feb. 23 from 5 to 8 p.m. as part of a group showcase with fellows J.J. Starr-McClain and Seth Wang, who will give readings of their poetry and fiction, respectively.

Morel grew up in the Bronx. His figurative collages construct narratives of surreal, iconographic scenes of the Afro-Caribbean experience unfolding in urban landscapes. His work is often based on intimate moments of daily life on public display in New York City.

The collage he’s currently working on showcases a Bronx street scene. “It’s supposed to feel Spike Lee-esque — where everything is busy tonally,” he says. The piece is currently 70 inches by 40 inches but could change in size as he adds and subtracts.

In the collage, he used the fabric from MAP for a bright television screen and a grainy molding paste for the black street. “I like grainy things,” he says. “My work is dirty on purpose — a window is never clean from the outside.” A black car is made with canvas he cut and sprayed with adhesive for a glossy effect.

He’s still making decisions about what goes in front of what in the collage. “The main thing,” he says, “is finding guiding lines so everything’s proportional.”

In Morel’s A Third of Brewster — a dynamic piece that was featured in Camp Provincetown’s “A Collage Show” at the Commons last November — we see a jigsaw of rooftops from above Brewster Street in Provincetown’s East End. Layers of cut fabric add to the sense of Provincetown houses built almost on top of each other.

Another collage in progress features two men in suits standing side by side. The work is inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest. “I use films and directors’ stylings to inform how my work is framed,” he says.

One man’s coat is made of leaves. “In the movie, they’re all in black and gray suits,” says Morel, “but these robes feel Caribbean or South African inspired.” The film has a corporate feel, but Morel says he’s making it “spicy.”

“Someone told me I made the guy’s suit purple because of Prince,” he says. “Sure!”

Social Amoebas is based on a mirror selfie Morel took with two friends and is made from pages cut out of National Geographic. “In a lot of my collage work I use scientific magazines because they’re forced to be illustrative and dilute their big ideas into visual forms — graphs, diagrams, and color theory — to show big concepts,” he says.

When you step back from Morel’s collages, the textured material begins to make comprehensive visual sense. “My work unravels as you move away from it,” he says. “It forces people to stay with the work.” He invites people to touch it, and they don’t believe him.

Morel double-majored in art and computer science at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. After graduating, he worked as a teaching assistant in the art department. Then the pandemic hit. Morel had to leave campus and his studio. “I had huge paintings there,” he says. “Who knows where they are now?”

Morel spent the first half of the pandemic back home in the Bronx. There he dove fully into collage. “Canvases always felt a little constraining,” he says. “It’s more fun to add on to something.”

In 2022, Morel completed an M.F.A. from Boston University, where the sculptural painter Lucy Kim and painter Josephine Halvorson served as mentors. “They gave me a lot of reality checks,” he says.

Morel is inspired by the work of artists Nicole Eisenman and Tschabalala Self. His iPad background is a photo of Eisenman’s Another Green World. “It’s dense and populated,” says Morel. “It has a community-based sort of intimacy.”

Morel doesn’t have a studio in the Bronx. He was working out of his brother’s girlfriend’s basement in the Kingsbridge neighborhood before moving to Provincetown. “She said I didn’t have to pay her — just give her a piece of art,” Morel says. He told her he would renovate the basement in return for the studio space.

His large-scale collage De dos a once de la noche, currently on display in the FAWC fellows’ group show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, was made in her Bronx basement. The piece depicts a worker with a mop and is based on Morel’s time as a union representative for service workers at LaGuardia Airport.

“You see people coming in and out day after day and working tirelessly with corporate pressure above them,” he says. He left the piece untitled for a long time: “How do you embody all that feeling?”

All That Feeling

The event: A showcase with FAWC fellows Oscar Morel, J.J. Starr-McClain, and Seth Wang
The time: Friday, Feb. 23, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free