PAUL D'AGOSTINO

In addition to making art, primarily paintings and works on paper in various media, I also do a great deal of work as a writer and editor, and as a translator of several languages. As such, texts, narratives, and translations real and metaphorical often factor into my works and processes.

Many of these aspects of my art are present in my Chromatic Alphabet paintings. For these works, I developed an extensive alphabet based on colors and simple shapes so that I could make paintings featuring letters, words or expressions without necessarily appearing to feature anything of the sort.

All of the paintings featured here are from this body of work. For the most part, each painting 'says' the word that is also the title of the piece. The painting here titled "Zeit," for instance, the German word for 'time,' bears that title because that's the word that makes up the composition. Read as a sequence of letters arranged in a grid, that is, ‘Zeit’ is the word the painting ‘says.’

One of the paintings here features my Simplified Chromatic Alphabet, which is my full, 26-letter standard alphabet, the basis of my larger writing system. There are several dozen other letters in the foundational system as well, such as letters with accents or other particularities. For the most part, you can use this particular painting to 'read' the others.

I have made hundreds of paintings and works on paper in my Chromatic Alphabet series, and I continue to develop new approaches to composition and metaphorical suggestiveness. It has become a deeply meaningful body of work for me, and I believe the same might be said for the numerous collectors who have welcomed these works into their private homes and institutions.

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My artworks have been featured in many solo and group exhibitions, and my activities as an artist and curator have been reviewed or featured in a number of publications, including ARTNews, Art Review, The New York Times, Vice, Whitehot, The Huffington Post, Paper Magazine, The New Criterion, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, ArtFCity, Gothamist, Rough Cuts, La Voce di New York, The Conversation Project and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. I was also the featured artist in a "Critic's Pick" article in the February 2014 issue of ARTNews.

My CV, links to press about my work, and more information about me and my art activities in general can be found at the website link here on my profile page, next to my social media links above. I would be pleased to connect with you on those platforms as well.