• Holy Roller - Image 1
  • Holy Roller - Image 2
  • Holy Roller - Image 3
  • Holy Roller - Image 4
1 4

Alfonse Pagano

Holy Roller

Holy Roller

€754,70 EUR
€754,70 EUR
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Edition
Holy Roller Two is part of the Shrines series and revisits an earlier work first made and exhibited in Washington, D.C. in the early 1980s, then lost. This second iteration brings the piece back as both reconstruction and memory.

Artwork Details

Artist:
Alfonse Pagano
Artist Gallery:
View all works by Alfonse Pagano
Year Created:
2025
Dimensions:
8 × 9 × 8in
Edition:
Original 1/1
Style:
Holy Roller presents as a votive vehicle: a white, boxlike shrine mounted on four spoked wheels and crowned by a dense cluster of lit taper candles. The palette is restrained to wax white, bone cream, soot-blackened wicks, and warm amber flame, with the fire supplying the only saturated color and animating the entire structure. The surface is built through accumulation and drip, with wax pooling over edges and trailing down the sides, while the rough, handmade body contrasts with the brittle geometry of the wheels. Pagano places the work in direct conversation with assemblage, reliquary objects, and devotional sculpture, bringing postwar mixed-media invention into the language of ritual and memory.
Tags:
assemblage,reliquary,votive,wax,shrine,mixed media,memory,ritual,luminosity,erosion

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

Website · Instagram · Facebook

Browse available works below.

View full details