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Alfonse Pagano

Five Stars and a Book

Five Stars and a Book

€679,83 EUR
€679,83 EUR
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Edition
Five Stars and a Book is a small, contained piece made from paper and text. A handwritten page sits behind a row of five stars. Below, a stack of worn pages is compressed into a solid block. It holds a sense of use and time. The stars suggest a system or measure. The book carries what’s left.

Artwork Details

Artist:
Alfonse Pagano
Artist Gallery:
View all works by Alfonse Pagano
Year Created:
2021
Dimensions:
7 × 13 × 3in
Edition:
Original 1/1
Style:
Alfonse Pagano builds the work as a narrow, vertical reliquary in paper, handwriting, and compression. The eye meets the five cream-colored stars first, set across the lower middle against a field of warm tan script and a dense, striated block of worn pages that reads like sediment. White edging frames the interior and intensifies the object’s objecthood, giving the surface the force of a constructed panel rather than a page. The work sits in the lineage of assemblage, concrete poetics, and postwar paper-based relief, in conversation with artists who turn text and accumulated material into weight, memory, and record.
Tags:
assemblage,paper relief,text,found material,concrete poetry,memory,abstraction,sepia,patina,conceptual

About Alfonse Pagano

Alfonse Pagano creates original artwork available to collect on Art Emerge, an AI-powered marketplace for artists and collectors.

Born in 1951 in Paterson, New Jersey, into a third-generation Italian American family. Paterson was gritty, vibrant, and full of contradictions—elements that continue to shape how He sees and make art. Raised by a single mother who saw his creative spark early, He was given freedom to explore. By fourteen, He knew art wasn’t a hobby—it was a path. Though He studied briefly at the School of Visual Arts, He is mostly self-taught. Alfonse learned by making, reading, and working with others—most memorably, Len Lye in the early ’70s. His energy and commitment left a mark. Alfonse has had many studios the first one was above Beacon Paints on the corner of Amsterdam and 78 Street.

Artist Statement

I began somewhere in the late 1960s, working with cardboard, photographs, and found images—early attempts to understand and organize my world, to hold a fragment of landscape, memory, and human presence as a visual object.. Even then, what mattered to me was not only what the object became, but the act of altering it: cutting, burning, layering, erasing, and rebuilding. The action itself carried as much weight as the final form.I have allways divided my time between painting and sculpture and the combining of the two.

Selected Highlights

  • All Politics Are Local, Jackson Junge Gallery, Chicago, IL
  • Rituals and Identity, Ann Street Gallery, Newburgh, NY
  • Dreads, WBGO Gallery, Newark, NJ
  • Dreads, Paterson Museum, Paterson, NJ
  • Dreads, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

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