• Lawyers and Liars Two ( Rush to Relics ) - Image 1
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Alfonse Pagano

Lawyers and Liars Two ( Rush to Relics )

Lawyers and Liars Two ( Rush to Relics )

¥202,042 JPY
¥202,042 JPY
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Edition
Lawyers and Liars Two 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:
Alfonse Pagano turns the American flag into a fractured field of graphite gray, soot black, and oxidized red, with the stars reduced to faint, partially erased emblems embedded in a worked-over surface. The first thing the eye meets is not patriotic clarity but abrasion: layered drawing, scraped paint, and soft smudging that keep the image in a state of pressure and revision. Pagano builds the composition as a vertical icon split into unstable zones, aligning the work with the critical flag traditions of Jasper Johns and the politically charged materiality of postwar assemblage, while keeping the touch distinctly raw and improvised. The result is both image and evidence, a surface that records erasure as form.
Tags:
political abstraction,american flag,mixed media,abrasion,grayscale,postwar assemblage,graphic symbolism,erasure,contemporary critique

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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