The back side of the Town Ballroom is getting a new mural, thankfully. If there was a wall in downtown Buffalo that could benefit from a mural, it’s the back side of the Town Ballroom on Washington Street. While Main Street has managed to come a long way with its building facades, the rather bland Washington Street side has not been so lucky (including The Town Ballroom and the Hostel Buffalo-Niagara). Then there’s the lackluster Post Office, which has been on the development radar in recent months.
But all of that is about to change.
The mural, part of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Public Art Initiative, is the first to get underway in 2019. Felipe Pantone (Argentinian-Spanish – born Argentina, 1986) is the artist. Pantone has a Fine Art degree (Valencia, Spain) – his works revolve around dynamism, transformation, omnipresence, and themes related to the present times, according the Albright-Knox.
Pantone is the product of a technological age when kids unlocked life’s mysteries through the internet. As a result of this prolonged screen time, he explores how the displacement of the light spectrum impacts color and repetition.
Visible in his art is the embattlement of analog past and a digitized future, where the two collide and intermesh with one another. The collision brought about by machine and man brings about spectacles that broadcast “a prism of neon gradients, geometric shapes, optical patterns, and jagged grids.”
“Color only happens because of light, and light is the only reason why life happens,” Pantone says. “Light and color are the very essence of visual art. Thanks to television, computers, and modern lighting, our perception of light and color has changed completely.”
In the future, instead of musicians loading into the Town Ballroom through an uninspiring back entranceway, they will now be greeted with a far out work of art, thanks to the bold public art vision of The AK.