• Time is a songbird - Image 1
  • Time is a songbird - Image 2
  • Time is a songbird - Image 3
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Alfonse Pagano

Time is a songbird

Time is a songbird

$753.50 USD
$753.50 USD
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Edition
A somewhat autobiographic work "Time is a Songbird " (Shrines ) is a small, box-framed work that holds a devotional image behind a dense field of melted yellow candles. The image is familiar—an icon—but it’s partially obscured, pushed back behind accumulation, time, and residue. A small figure at the base anchors the piece, almost like an offering or a relic. The work sits somewhere between shrine and artifact, private and worn. It suggests time not as something passing cleanly, but as something that gathers, blocks, and reshapes what we think we see.

Artwork Details

Artist:
Alfonse Pagano
Artist Gallery:
View all works by Alfonse Pagano
Year Created:
2020
Dimensions:
7 × 13 × 3in
Edition:
Original 1/1
Style:
The work meets the eye as a compact devotional cabinet: a vertical white box with a sacred image pressed behind a dense front plane of melted yellow candles. Pagano builds the surface through accumulation and obstruction, so the icon’s blue robe, gold halo, and pale flesh tones register through residue, wax drips, and a soft veil of wear. The composition is frontal and enclosed, with the small figure at the base acting as an anchor against the crowded, almost barricading field of candle stubs. It belongs in the lineage of shrine objects and assemblage, in conversation with Catholic votive culture and the material intensity of artists who treat time, abrasion, and found imagery as active form.
Tags:
assemblage,shrine,votive,relief,icon,wax,yellow,devotional,mixed media,memory

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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