Stratum 01 — The environment · 2023 — now

The environment

The work expands into life: houses, spheres, entire cities.

one of the densest layers of the studio registry · about the archive →

Three museums look back just as the work begins to look around. In 2023 the Kunsthal in Rotterdam presents his first museum solo show; the Centre del Carme surveys it in Valencia, close to home; the MUBAG hangs him face to face with Eusebio Sempere, 28 works against 28 silkscreens, and the largest mural in the museum's history is destroyed at closing because that is how it was conceived. In the middle of the retrospective, the practice changes medium: it stops being an object that hangs and becomes a place to be in. Light, sound, architecture, garden.

Casa Axis is the center of gravity. A space-age villa in Valencia, finished around 1975, known in the area as «la casa giratoria»: the central body was meant to rotate on its axis and never did. He found it after years of searching for a studio and it ended up being much more: an artists' residence, a new studio, an archive, and an underground 1970s discotheque restored with sound by Admire Audio. Inside there is no decoration, there is work that gets used: a pool tiled like a Chromadynamica that you swim in, a bedroom with a printed-fabric wall, a garage with a shifting light gradient that paints the cars. And on the walls, the genealogy he has spent his whole career in dialogue with: Cruz-Diez, Le Parc, Sempere, Olafur Eliasson, Tomás Saraceno, Elias Crespin.

On October 29, 2024 the DANA storm razed the production studio in Massanassa, with the opening of Casa Axis just around the corner. The response was that of a system, not of a victim: in little more than a week Auction for Action was under way, with lots from 300 euros and all proceeds going to those affected — nothing for his own studio — and in 2025 the mural TERRA DE VALENTIA opened an urban art route in Benetússer in homage to the 16 municipalities that were hit.

Scale, too, becomes environment. In 2024 he paints the largest work of his career, 25 stories in Jersey City; in February 2026 his gradients take over the Exosphere of the Sphere in Las Vegas, the largest exterior LED surface in the world, in the same city where his 2016 mural was demolished: from wall to screen, ten years later. The Fine Arts faculty of the UPV wears a facade of his — 571,824 recycled-glass tesserae — that returns at night the light it absorbs by day. While the studio gets the new series going — COLOR SPACE, SVK, DIVERGENT DATA, OPTICHROMIE STRUCTURAL INSTABILITY, still in production — the parallel track stays open: graffiti still takes up space. The environment is the medium; what activates the work is still whoever is inside.

«Aunque mi estudio y mis obras se vieron afectados por la tormenta Dana, no me considero una víctima. Esta iniciativa tiene que ver con levantar a la gente de Valencia.»

Felipe Pantone, Valencia Plaza 2024
MUBAG, Alicante, 2023–24. Five Chromadynamica in series and the two-story stairwell mural: the largest work ever shown in the museum's history, ephemeral by design, destroyed at closing.
MUBAG, Alicante, 2023–24. Five Chromadynamica in series and the two-story stairwell mural: the largest work ever shown in the museum's history, ephemeral by design, destroyed at closing.
Locomotive — documented in the graffiti book; details and context to be clarified with the artist.
Locomotive — documented in the graffiti book; details and context to be clarified with the artist.
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