felipe pantone pixelates residential swimming pool with 130,000 rainbow glass mosaics

Argentinian-Spanish artist Felipe Pantone follows a pixelated canon. From his rendition of Poltrona Frau's Archibald armchair to his Miller Division skateboard, his saturated, often kaleidoscopic touch shows up, signing his oeuvre with renowned aesthetics. This time, he strolls inside a residential swimming pool in a seafront home in Jávea (Spain) and adds some 130,000 mosaic tesserae by ONIX into the once modest-looking architecture.

It creates an optical effect that makes the rippling water whirl in delight as the glass mosaics play with the sunlight, amplified by the whirlwind-like and thorough placement of the tesserae. Pantone names his work ‘Chromadynamica Pool’. The pixelated ensemble of the glass mosaics shakes up the classic design of the residence, a form of striking contrast with the work of architect Esther Santos brewing.

The artist is known for his unabashed use of light and color, and in this intervention, he has created a mosaic spectrum in tones of blue, yellow, and red that merges individual pixels in a constantly shifting rainbow. The mosaic tiles then toy with the viewers’ eyes as they trick them with the movement of the water. The small inch-sized mosaics flow in a surprising and shifting optical effect. The rippling water, combined with the constantly shifting light gives the appearance of a living design in permanent movement.

images courtesy of Felipe Pantone and ONIX

Felipe Pantone takes his cues from the desire to ‘create an effect that had never been seen in a pool before: an underwater design that focuses on the light. The colors from the diffracted light submerged in the reflections of the water. I love the contrast it forms with the rest of the house, with its clean-cut forms, as well as with the views and the setting,’ he says.

The burst of color radiating from the residential swimming pool is brought about by the gushing movement of the mosaic tiles by ONIX, formed as an outward spread that extends to the side walls. Light and color come together, and the swimming pool's painterly compositions are heightened by the position of red and yellow tiles, hawkish in the way they announce their presence among the still-blue hues of the other tiles.

Felipe Pantone selected seven distinct tessera hues for the design

Like with his other works, Pantone starts his creative process with a digital phase where he turns to a number of computer programs to create designs that can later be translated into friezes, murals, paintings, and sculptures. These tangible outcomes add a sense of touch and texture to works that originate in the digital world. In Chromadynamica Pool, a residential swimming pool's interior served as Pantone's setting for an underwater prismatic spiral of color made of glass mosaic tiles.

Pantone carefully selected seven distinct hues for the tiles, and the potent prescription of his curation burgeons into using a total of 130,000 glass mosaic tiles The end effect presents itself as another masterful alteration of space by the artist, made possible by his creative play on color and light. Once again, Felipe Pantone has aced a large-scale project embedded with his indelible footprint, making use of water as an added layer into his zestful narrative.

the residential swimming pool in a seafront home in Jávea, Spain

the artist adds thousands of mosaic tesserae by ONIX into the once modest-looking architecture