Felipe Pantone Photograph - Limited Edition of 15

Portrait of street artist Felipe Pantone Artist studio - Valencia - 2018 High-resolution image on top-quality paper covered by a 3 mm methacrylate sheet with a dibond back frame, ready to hang. Each copy is numbered and signed on the back by hand. Certificate of Authenticity included. Pantone is an artist born in Argentina but living in Spain. He is one of those street artists who never shows his face, so censorship was important for his portrait. The Symbiosis project started as a way of protecting the artists’ anonymity without censoring their faces using pixelization but, in this case, I made an exception because what we used to censor his face are not pixels but color swatches of the Pantone color scheme. When I placed these color swatches on a layer on top of his skin and changed the blending mode in Photoshop, they modified his skin tone, as little square filters that make us see the same person in different colors. The concept of this portrait is based on this idea, the person behind this layer is always the same, but the color filters create an illusion of different appearance. It is important to realize we apply these filters to others, but others also see us through their filters. For example, someone might see me as a “Spanish guy with tattoos” and I might see him as an “American guy in a suit” or “a cop wearing a uniform”. These filters based on our appearance make communication difficult because we establish some preconceptions about the other based on external factors. Many times we use this appearance to judge others, and this is a terrible mistake. You must never judge anyone for their appearance, not even their words, because what defines people is not how they look like or what they say, but their actions. Your actions are what define you as a human being. By judging others for their appearance, we can miss the opportunity of knowing some great people from which we could learn something if we allowed ourselves to truly know them. This is not only related with people’s skin but also age, gender, nationality or religion. If you think that you have nothing to learn from an old lady from India, you will definitely not learn anything from her, but that’s not because she has nothing to teach you, but because you are judging her just for her appearance and assuming there is nothing you can learn from her. Learning is an active process that takes place in your brain, you will never learn anything from someone from whom you think you have nothing to learn. Races, countries and religions are inventions of humans. There is only one race, the human race, we share the same planet, and all religions are related to the same questions: Who we are? Where do we come from? What is the purpose of this life? The illusion of separation and our self-limitations divide us by constructing an image of ourselves based on external factors which have nothing to do with who we truly are. You are a lot more than your appearance, but to realize this you must start looking at what is inside you, rather than what is outside. You will never know yourself if you look for the answer in others, if you base your perception of the self in what others think or see in you. The only way of finding yourself is by looking inside of you, not outside. And when you start looking inside, you realize something quite hard to see at first sight: You see others using your own filters, and others see you using their filters, but what is harder to see is you also apply filters to yourself, and you end up believing you are defined by those filters. You create different characters you use to interact with your friends, your family or your workmates. You may develop a fun character because you want people to like you, or a shy character because you are afraid of people not liking you. And you end up believing you actually are this character, like an actor interpreting a role for so long he forgot he is an actor. It's like censorship, we censor our true self by creating an external character, and we censor others by seeing them through our filters. When you start observing yourself from your silent consciousness, you start seeing these patterns of behaviour, these characters you created, and you realize you are not them, because in many cases there is more than one. Your true self must be unique. And finally, you understand the separation between the characters created by your ego and your true self, your real consciousness, who is there just watching the play silently. This realization is the first step to move away from these characters and start remembering who you truly are, start deconstructing these roles you have been using for so long and start being yourself.

Photography:Manipulated on Other

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:15

Size:22 W x 29.5 H x 0.4 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.