CAN Review – Panter Xhita is a rising star in the cryptoart community. Her work continues to evolve and mature in both concept and technique, and she has a growing number of collectors eager for her next art drop. Her paintings often contain a bricolage of conceptual elements that inspire and inform her painting and overall composition. Her painting ‘Lost Song’ has an almost mystical quality as the subject is surrounded by iconography including planets and ancient tribal skulls. The central character appears to be manipulating or connecting to the soul of a dead bird through some form of cybernetic finger accessories. The character’s face is rendered very delicately, and her closed eyes add to the sense that this is a form of ritual.
The next painting ‘Burn The Water’ clearly speaks of ecological damage, where mankind has abused our natural resources, and animal life is subjected to pain and death due to a transient desire for material things. Panter however depicts a blindfolded figure surrendering to her imagination in the hope for a better future. The blurring of the head and feet alludes to the passing of time within this surreal landscape, and the poetic nature of the work invites the viewer to study the work in more detail and hopefully make their own connections to the imagery presented within each composition.
The final piece ‘Our Blood is Made of Roses’, also depicts the turmoil between living with and against nature. It’s important to note that Panter provides additional written narrative in her descriptions of each artwork, and in this case, it is one that reflects the contrary nature of humanity whereby what we are seeking often comes at a personal cost to our environment, wildlife, and ourselves. The combination of narrative alongside the surreal painted bricolage of elements creates an almost mystical quality yet again. There is a sense of beauty here, but it is tempered with suffering and contradiction.
CAN look forward to seeing Panter’s work gain more recognition within the cryptoart community. Why some of the bigger platforms have not invited this artist to join them is a mystery, but I sense that this will change in the near future.
Name
Panter Xhita
Social media links and website profiles
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PXhita
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/panter.xhita/?hl=es-la
Rarible: https://app.rarible.com/panterxhita?tab=created
What is your background as an artist in general?
I have an universitary degree in Visual Arts, there I took the sculptor speciality but I never stopped drawing and painting. Also I come from a family of artists because my mother is a sculptor and a jewellery designer, so my whole life has been surrounded by art. Last year I had my first physical exposition in my hometown. It was small but quite special to me, because it was the first. And I had planned another one for this year, but of course everything changed when I discovered cryptoart.
What is your overall process in generating art?
My process is always also in a process of changing. Initially I only knew how to use the brush tool, so I just painted everything: you can see that in my first minted works like “Lap tortoise” or “He thinks in the tub”. Now I do sketches in pencil, and use some friends and people that I love or myself as models. I picture them. I make them do crazy stuff (that’s why I use people that I love and loves me back haha), and then I use the photographs as sketches and I start the composition using other images that relate to my main project. For that part, the compositional one, I use the technique of free association of elements but always related to the project: so humans, animals, nature, culture and technology.
How would you describe your art in your own words?
I think I use surrealism as a tool to make figurative conceptual art.
Favourite artists / influences?
Lilliana Porter, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, James Jean, Carlos Alonso, Remedios Varo.
How did you discover Crypto Art NFTs?
A few years ago a friend gifted me an old wacom tablet and I started learning and using some Photoshop on my mom’s computer. I made some pieces but I never gave it the time that any kind of art deserves to improve. Until a couple of months ago when this same friend, that is a trader, talked to me about cryptoart. And it’s funny because he was always forcing me to learn about cryptos and finances and stuff like that that I still don’t quite get, but when he told me about cryptoart my eyes lit up. I saw the value of the space immediately and I started digging and studying, and I found out a truly amazing place. I started painting every hour of every day and here I am now: with a constant headache, but super happy.
How would you like the field of cryptoart and nfts to evolve over time?
The main problem right now are gas fees. That needs to be solved so there are always new artists entering to the scene. I think that’s healthy for our community: to keep expanding.
Anything you’d like to say that this form hasn’t covered?
I am interested in the role as intermediary of humans in the interaction between culture and nature. It is amazing to think of us as the link that binds two such dissimilar phenomena. Nature, on one hand, with its slow but sure evolutionary time. And culture, on the other hand, with its frenetic times of increasingly rapid changes upon reality. I usually work with three types of elements: -Animals that represent the natural stability of the bodies -Futuristic technology that symbolize the speed of human action on their own circumstances -And humans, who always seem to be in motion and broken by the different times that they go through. The pieces are not intended to be optimistic or pessimistic about the future. They intend to show the complexity of the times that lie ahead. They try to warn us about the human creativity, because is gaining such speed that it may provoke the risk of getting out of control and exceed (even if it is our own creation) the capacities of human reflection.
You can view more of Panter’s work on her social media links above and her Rarible created page
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