Felipe Pantone’s images scramble your vision, bringing you to another dimension. In his first exhibition in Brussels, this Argentinian-Spanish artist will tickle your retinas with his paintings and sculptures full of dynamic movement.
© Guy Boris
| “I produce more than seven visual pieces a week and every one of them says much more about me than my face.”
Felipe Pantone: graffiti in the age of twitter
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I think we are living in the most incredible period of humanity. Thanks to the internet, society and culture are constantly evolving. That’s something I love.” This man in a hurry is Felipe Pantone, who became known by the name Pant1 as part of the graffiti scene in Valencia. Leaving his hastily painted metro carriages behind, he now travels the world to paint walls with his mosaic-like compositions. His current work has moved away from the shiny oversized lettering of his early days. He now creates colourful, geometric compositions that resemble a TV test card whose signal is scrambled in places, with symbols, checked patterns, and wavy lines that draw you into another dimension. “Playing with an expanding colour palette, I was trying to capture the feeling people can get when they’re scrolling through their Instagram. Sometimes, you don’t even know what you’re seeing any more when you look at your screen. Your fingers move so fast that you only retain half the information.”
Graffiti is to art what Ikea is to furniture: something simple, instant, inexpensive, and disposable
Pantone gave his exhibition with Alice Gallery the title “Excès de vitesse” (“speeding” or “speeding offence”). To indicate speed, of course, and because of the way the words sound in French. He wrote a lot about words and speed in his Ultra-dynamic Manifesto, which he published in homage to the Manifesto of Futurism. In it, he calls graffiti the ultimate “ism”, the art of our time, and relates how his experience of graffiti and of the flow of information has influenced him personally and shaped his art. “Information is no longer only found in newspapers. It’s on Twitter and in blogs. It’s free to access and temporary. Graffiti is to art what Ikea is to furniture: something simple, instant, inexpensive, and disposable.”
When he is not exhibiting in galleries, Felipe Pantone paints large-scale murals all over the world. These compositions, to which he gives mellow names such as Chromadynamica and Optichromie, cover walls in Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. For him, size makes no fundamental difference to the work. The process of creating a composition is identical. The scale just determines the distance from which the piece must be viewed to be grasped as a whole.
We’re all connected
Though Felipe Pantone likes to work in a series, each mural is a unique experience. There are a few in Belgium, in Liège and Dour for example, but one of the most impressive is the one which occupies a wall on the bank of the canal in Hasselt. It depicts a QR code, which measures 30 by 25 metres and is thought to be the biggest in the world. The image has, of course, been widely circulated online, which was the intention. Anyone who scans it is taken to the artist’s website, which tells them their physical location and shows the total number of views, locating them on a map of the world. “It’s a reflection on the status of the image today. Does the nature of my work change depending on whether I’m painting a wall in Japan or in Morocco? No, I don’t think so, because we are all connected. It doesn’t matter where they are in the world, people who scan this code will see the same thing.”
His art may be freely accessible, but the artist himself prefers to maintain his privacy. When he gives an interview or makes a public appearance, Felipe Pantone hides his face behind an iridescent mask. This anonymity is inherent to the culture of graffiti artists, but that isn’t the only reason. “I produce more than seven visual pieces a week and every one of them says much more about me than my face, which in itself is of no interest.”
> Felipe Pantone: Excès de Vitesse. > 30/6, Alice Gallery
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