Felipe Pantone

Modern Dynamics

The city of Valencia is rife with street art, spanning from graffiti tags by local writers to commissioned murals by international artists. The virtuoso of the region—and perhaps of Spain itself—is none other than graffiti vandal turned fine contemporary artist Felipe Pantone.

Although Pantone was born in Argentina, his family relocated to the Spanish municipality when he was ten. Two years later, an ambitious, pre-teen Pantone picked up his first spray can and started bombing local walls. Since then he has spent over a decade developing his style, experimenting with various letterforms including calligraphy, wild style, 3D, characters and even dabbling in photorealism with spray paint. “I think you find your style by elimination because you don't know what you want, but you know what you're not. I guess I was trying everything and eventually I found my style at the very end,” he says.

Pantone garnered an international reputation in the graffiti world under the name of PANT1. Alternating conventional graffiti, typography and abstraction, his progressive practice merges elements of graphic design with geometric shapes to create a futuristic aesthetic. Onlookers of his works are immediately pulled into his complex compositions that feature gradient color blocks, concentric lines and computer glitches. His prolific creations are observed not only on the walls of Valencia, but also at major institutes across the globe, including Mesa Contemporary Arts Center in Arizona, the Long Beach Museum of Art in California and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. One of his more ambitious undertakings was his mural for the 2016 edition of the Maus Festival in Malaga, where the artist's unmistakable palette of iridescent colors stretched across the entire length of a bridge overlooking the river Guadalmedina.

Pantone’s practice isn’t confined just to walls or the traditional canvas; he has marked his crisp abstractions on motorcycles, race cars and planes—which aptly complements his aesthetic that evokes movement and speed. To heighten the feeling of motion in his compositions, he often paints black and white colors beside each other, creating intense contrast and retinal fatigue while also tricking the eye. Collectively, Pantone’s style pays homage to the works of expert colorists Victor Vasarely and Carlos Cruz-Diez. While adding his own artistic twists, he mimics their unique abstraction and stroboscopic motifs packed with blackand-white geometric shapes that are then highlighted with metallic colors.

“I THINK GRAFFITI IS TO ART, WHAT TWITTER IS TO NEWSPAPERS. IT'S IMMEDIATE, IT'S FREE, IT'S EPHEMERAL— AND EVERYONE CAN DO IT.”

Pantone’s multi-faceted work explores our relationship with new technologies. He himself is an avid supporter of the Internet, calling it a significant tool that enables humans to seamlessly communicate with each other in opposite parts of the world and grant tech-savvy individuals instant access to the history of humanity. Adhering to the fundamentals of today’s technological age, Pantone has shifted his approach from hands-on to virtual. Lately, he’s been creating designs on a computer and bringing them into the analog world with massive 3D-printing machines that emit paint in vivid hues.

We recently sat down with the artist in one of his Valencia studios to discuss his ever-evolving artworks and creative processes, and how he keeps up with the latest technologies that will surely be incorporated into his ultra-dynamic practice.

Q & A

Before contemporary fine art, you were heavily involved with graffiti. Can you tell us about your background in graffiti? When I was ten years old, my parents and I moved from Argentina to this little town here in Valencia, Spain. At the time, there was graffiti everywhere. Around 12 years old, I picked up my first spray can, went to town and started painting.

You mentioned that, as soon as you could afford the materials, you moved on from graffiti to the fine art style that you're developing now. So did you have a love for graffiti in the beginning, or was that the only way you could get your art out there previously? No, I love graffiti. I think graffiti is beautiful. It's like a kid; it's so stupid but so beautiful and innocent. When people do graffiti they don't care who’s watching. All they care about is other graffiti writers.

It's also the same idea behind doing it because it's cheap. On the flip side, people don't necessarily need to pay a museum to see it, because it's for everybody. Yes, but that's something I realized way after. It's an art form that belongs only to this century. I think graffiti is to art, what Twitter is to newspapers. It's immediate, it's free, it's ephemeral—and everyone can do it.

What do you say to those critics who claim, 'If it's not illegal, it's not graffiti.' Do you agree or disagree? Graffiti is about writing your name as many times as possible, as big as possible, with as much style as possible, in as many places as possible. Whether it's legal or illegal—graffiti writers really don’t give a shit. They'll see a piece on a wall, and they'll want to create something bigger. They just want to do it and win the game.

What are your thoughts on the state of graffiti today? Is it still as prominent as it was in the ’70s? Graffiti is still as crazy as it was back then. Whether it’s in America or in Europe, there are a lot of kids who are still doing it. I still do it. I go and paint trains where my artwork won't even be noticed by the public. I go on a mission for like 12 hours. My recent one was in Belgium: it was snowing like crazy and my clothes were stained with mud.

You talked a lot about “subtractive variability.” Is that just an aesthetic principle? Tell us more. That’s the name of a series that I’m working on. It’s inspired by the CYMK spectrum, the colors that are normally used in printing presses. With these paintings, I move the material that I want to use under a humongous printer and start with only one color. It's a fun series for me to explore. Recently, I collaborated on an Instagram filter that utilizes these exact colors for people to virtually interact with this visual phenomenon.

How do you approach brand collaborations? First and foremost, it has to be a brand that I respect. In this case, when Hennessy approached me, I knew right away what their brand is all about and the partnerships they've done previously. I was really humbled and stoked that I was going to join this club of collaborations with artists who are also my biggest heroes, like KAWS,

Futura, Shepard Fairey, Os Gemeos and Vhils last year. So generally, if I know it's a partnership that will help my career or a brand I love beforehand, it's going to make sense for my work.

What was the inspiration for your new collaborative Hennessy bottle? I went to Cognac, and Hennessy explained their process. I met their master blender and learned more about their tradition. They're a really old brand, but they do things in a way where the youth still fucks with it. We sat down to plan the design, seeing what sort of visual connections there were between my work and the brand. I guess I also care about art history and what's been done before. However, at the same time, I want to do things that haven't been done before.

In a lot of ways, your work is interactive. You have Instagram filters, configurable art, the world's largest QR code mural in Belgium. What does that link to? Scan it right now. When you do, it takes you to an online page where it says "You're the 500,000th person who scanned this." Even if this piece is in Belgium, it's been scanned by people all across the globe and there's a map that shows where people scanned it from. It's basically a statement about ubiquity. You can be anywhere and everywhere. Your art doesn't belong to a physical space

“I’M ALWAYS WORKING ON PIECES THAT PEOPLE CAN INTERACT WITH. IT’S NOT AS EASY AS MAKING A PAINTING.”

anymore. Everything is global. I'm always working on pieces that people can interact with. It's not as easy as making a painting.

Do you have a preference for where your work is shown? When I'm working in a white cube, it's beautiful. You can be free and do whatever you want. On the other side, when you're painting outside, there are a lot more risks, like cops chasing you, or it's getting dark, or the lift doesn't reach the left part of the wall. All of those things add more challenges to your creative process. You have to adapt, but limitations always enhance creativity. I don't have a preference.

In this social media age where basically anything, or anyone, can be a brand, how did you turn these motifs into your personal artist brand? I think it's because I use them a lot. But I'm not just using them to claim them. I paint computer glitches and whatnot because I genuinely like them. The compositions are also not random, even if it may look random or spontaneous for some. I select every pattern and place them where it makes sense for me. Even if it's abstract or doesn't make sense, I guess my goal for creating them is to guide viewers into some sort of thought. By believing what I believe, I guess I own it, but I'll never say that I own these visuals.