• ALM - Image 1
  • ALM - Image 2
  • ALM - Image 3
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Alfonse Pagano

ALM

ALM

$3,025.00 USD
$3,025.00 USD
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Edition
ALM reimagines the American flag as a fragile textile monument. Constructed from unbleached fabric, the familiar symbol is stripped of color and allowed to fall downward in long vertical bands that gather and collapse at the base of the wall. The stars remain faintly present while the stripes dissolve into gravity and cloth, suggesting both absence and persistence. The flag becomes less an emblem of authority and more a quiet field of memory, vulnerability, and unresolved questions. By removing the traditional red, white, and blue, the work asks viewers to reconsider what the flag represents and whose lives it is meant to hold within it. The cascading fabric evokes mourning, endurance, and the weight of collective history.

Artwork Details

Artist:
Alfonse Pagano
Artist Gallery:
View all works by Alfonse Pagano
Year Created:
2020
Dimensions:
40 × 96 × 24in
Edition:
Original 1/1
Style:
Alfonse Pagano’s ALM meets the eye as a restrained, vertical field of unbleached cloth, its pale surface carrying the memory of the American flag without the force of color. The composition is divided between a square canton of faintly drawn stars and long, narrow strips that descend in parallel bands before collapsing into a dense heap at the base, where gravity becomes the final organizer. The handling is tactile and frank: stitched seams, soft folds, exposed edges, and pooling fabric create a relief sculpture that reads as both banner and residue. In conversation with postwar assemblage, textile-based conceptual sculpture, and the flag reworkings of Jasper Johns and Faith Ringgold, Pagano turns a national emblem into an object of mourning, endurance, and material truth.
Tags:
conceptual sculpture,textile,american flag,monochrome,mourning,memory,assemblage,gravity,political abstraction,wall relief

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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