Alfonse Pagano

Lawyers and Liars ( Rush to Relics )

€1.141,32 EUR

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Lawyers and Liars presents the American flag as unstable ground. The image is fractured—pulled apart and reassembled through drawing, paint, and abrasion. The surface feels worked over, uncertain, as if the structure itself can’t quite hold. It’s a flag, but not a fixed one. It reads more like a record of pressure—legal, political, moral—where language and truth start to blur. This is not about the symbol as authority, but about its erosion. What was once meant to unify now feels negotiated, bent, and rewritten.

Artwork Details

Artist:

Alfonse Pagano

Artist Gallery:

View all works by Alfonse Pagano

Year Created:

2017

Dimensions:

36 × 36 in

Edition:

Original 1/1

Style:

Pagano builds the flag from battered planes of navy, cobalt, white, and rusted red, so the image registers first as a structure under strain rather than a stable emblem. The surface is worked with visible drawing, translucent paint, scumbled passages, and abrasion, leaving ghost lines, scratches, and erasures that keep the composition open and unsettled. The stars drift across the blue field in a loose grid, while the stripes drop unevenly and the right-hand red band stands apart like a hard vertical seam; that tension places the work in direct conversation with the American flag paintings of Jasper Johns and the material dissent of postwar assemblage and political abstraction. Its square format intensifies the objecthood of the image, turning the flag into a compact field of fracture, repair, and revision.

Tags:

american flag,political abstraction,mixed media,abrasion,blue red white,neo-dada,assemblage,palimpsest,jaspers johns

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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Lawyers and Liars ( Rush to Relics )