The presentation was attended by the artist and several officials: Maria Cristina Serpa de Almeida, Ambassador of Portugal; Pascal Slivanski, Advisor for Culture and Cooperation of the French Embassy; and Matthieu Ardin, executive director of the French Institute in Ukraine.
Pantonio is a muralist from Portugal. He was born in the Azores – the island group, located in the Atlantic 1,500 kilometers away from the mainland. His real name is Antonio Correia. Having graduated from an art school, he started painting on the streets in the 1990s. His murals are full of frantic dynamism and motion; in them one can see a plexus of muscle tissue, or a strange ornament, or a swarm of fanciful creatures of black and blue wavy lines.
Pantonio gets inspired by animals of Portugal and France – sardines, swallows, hares, horses, lizards. The other source of inspiration are landscapes of his childhood – sea waves, black cliffs, mountains. Many of his murals can be found both in Lisbon and in Paris, where the artist lives now. It was the French capital where Pantonio created the biggest wall painting in Europe in 2015: a school of fish on the wall, 66 meters in height and 15 meters in width.
It is not the first time Pantonio has visited Kyiv: in August past year he completed a large-scale mural on the wall a 16-storey building at 95, Peremohy Avenue, near the Sviatoshyn metro station. He has also recently completed wall paintings at Mystetsky Arsenal and in Chornobyl.
His new artwork is located at 1, Chokolivsky Boulevard. Black-and-blue gigantic swallows spiraling into the wall look quite appropriate in the area that is overloaded with street traffic, cramped in gray concrete, cluttered with countless stalls and markets. In this everyday hell, this picture, as unusual, even slightly provocative it might look, is a vivid reminder that another environment, much friendlier to a human being, can exist.
Street art is not a panacea. But it is a rather effective means against social ugliness.
