Argentinian-Spanish artist Felipe Pantone has created a large-scale artwork on the bottom of a swimming pool. Located in a smart contemporary seafront home in Jávea, in a sunny corner of the Mediterranean, Pantone’s underwater artwork is a colorful glass mosaic made using thousands of tesserae by Spanish brand ONIX.
In his work, Pantone explores ways in which the displacement of the light spectrum impacts color and repetition. He considers light and color to be the essence of visual art. The infinity pool (named the ‘infinite pool’ by Pantone) at the home designed by architect Esther Santos, offered an ideal backdrop to create an underwater prismatic spiral of color. Using around 130,000 glass mosaic tiles, this giant work of pixel art forms a striking contrast with the adjacent white building.
To produce the mosaic, Pantone chose seven colors for the design, merging primary blue, yellow, and red tones. The geometric design spreads out from the centre of the pool, covering the bottom and sides, with red and yellow hues running into a series of blues.
Working with a space that is typically unnoticed — the bottom of a swimming pool — the artist achieved a dynamic play on color and light, with an optical effect that is magnified by water. By using one-inch tiles, a rainbow of colors appear in a permanent state of movement, the illusion generated by the quiet, rippling water and ever shifting Mediterranean light. From Pantone’s perspective, it was his intention “to create an effect that had never been seen in a pool before: an underwater design that focuses on the light.”
In his artistic process, Felipe Pantone begins with a digital phase that uses several computer programs to create colorful designs. The designs are later transformed into physical artworks, marking a connection between the digital and analog worlds.
