• Kartune ( Rush to Relics ) - Image 1
  • Kartune ( Rush to Relics ) - Image 2
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Alfonse Pagano

Kartune ( Rush to Relics )

Kartune ( Rush to Relics )

¥67,640 JPY
¥67,640 JPY
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Edition
Kartune takes the American flag and pushes it into something looser, almost like a quick sketch that won’t settle. Made with graphite and gouache on paper, the image is built up and broken down at the same time. The stripes push forward, the field of stars drifts, and the whole thing feels slightly off. It’s not about getting the image right—it’s about what happens when it starts to fall apart.

Artwork Details

Artist:
Alfonse Pagano
Artist Gallery:
View all works by Alfonse Pagano
Year Created:
2022
Dimensions:
11 × 14 in
Edition:
Original 1/1
Style:
Pagano turns the American flag into a restless, working image rather than a fixed emblem: red stripes are dragged, broken, and layered over one another, while the blue star field sits off to the upper right like a separate panel of weathered color. The gouache has a dry, scumbled opacity that leaves streaks, abrasions, and ghosted edges visible, and the graphite line keeps the structure nervy and provisional. The composition is tightly centered on a vertical axis, but the flag’s geometry is deliberately unsettled, placing the work in conversation with postwar gestural abstraction, collage, and the politically charged flag paintings of Jasper Johns and the material interventions of Robert Rauschenberg.
Tags:
american flag,gouache,graphite,gestural abstraction,assemblage,political imagery,red white blue,material abrasion,contemporary drawing

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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