Let's Talk About Art, Baby: Panter Xhita's "Not alone"
Celebrating Some More Damn Good Artistry
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!
This is actually perfect: Not only do I get to finally write about an artist whose work I’ve long admired, but the piece in question today is thematically relevant to a lovesick, habitually single guy like myself on a day as pregnant with expectation as today is.
The artist, Panter Xhita. The piece, Not alone. A masterwork by a master, and today I wanted to talk about why. There is so much to talk of Panter Xhita’s style, sensibility, and technique that is worth dissection and discussion, and I tried to include as much of it as possible. Was a real treat to go back into the artist’s archives, to a piece released well before the work which first drew my attention to her was minted. I hope you find Xhita’s piece as remarkable as I did.
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, on our Twitter, or in my own DMs.
Let’s hit it.
xoxo,
CohentheWriter
Artist: Panter Xhita
Artwork: Not alone
Source Link: https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430:109095
Date Minted: December 26, 2020
Artist Description: We are not alone, but we feel alone. We nest faith because we can't bear the silence. We make art from our tortured heart.
We are made by little pieces, even smaller than a bat or a mouse. We are connected by branches, or is it cables now?
We are a collective unconscious. A mosaic of people that, centuries before, also felt like if they were alone.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
From my first encounter with Panter Xhita’s work —2022’s triptych collection of 90 portraits called A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART— (upon which Xhita built in 2023 with another triptych mega-release called THE SECOND WAVE)— it was obvious this was a mightily-gifted painter. And also a mightily-creative thinker! Because if we saunter through the completed assemblies of Xhita’s triptychs we see Xhita’s uncommon specificity and care used ubiquitously. In Xhita’s both triptychs, Xhita’s powers of portraiture manifest not only in precise physical likenesses, but evocations of individual personalities that shine brightly, unmistakable. Take, for example, how Kristy Glas is portrayed by one the neon-colored cats she is often known for, and in her own style. Or how WGMeets’ head, unlike the caricature aesthetic of his peers, is instead his iconic faux-Cryptopunk PFP, complete with afro and all (which looks just like him). Angie Taylor, meanwhile, is decked-out in punk-rock attire and a unique scarlet color scheme. These artists aren’t only recognizable via Xhita’s practiced line-work and attention-to-detail, but by her keen usage of iconography.
I’ve been a fan of Xhita’s for a long time, and I was really interested in writing about an artwork that felt more initially alien to a crypto art aficionado like myself. So I scoured her earlier works, her digital paintings, and let something hit me. Didn’t take long. Not alone hit me. Here, whether by chance or because of thematic connection, is something akin to the triptychs Xhita is most known for. Here is that same portraiture prowess, and that same ability to wield all manner of textures and colors and styles. Here too is collage, though with a very different effect, for what I am compelled to believe is a very different purpose.
Not alone is an advanced study of the human form. In its center, three female-appearing figures stand facing us, all three nude, all three seeming disinterested in us voyeuristic observers. The left and right figures are facsimiles of one another, mirror-images with the same brushstroke-heavy skin coloration (tans and whites and darker browns), the same stringy crowns of snaking black curls, the same lopsided expressions; each reveals a single exposed breast (with white, imprecise smudges covering their nipples) and the same tangled mass of plant roots covering their pelvis. Each has only one trunk-like leg visible.
Between them, obscuring half of each, is a third, similar figure. But this one is shorter. Or perhaps she’s just closer to the frame itself. She is also fantastically more abstract. Gone are the brushstrokes of her companions, replaced by dissimilar mosaic tiles in the same skin-color tones. Her tiled face is barely recognizable. The gnarled roots in her hand are made into a completely abstract blob of browns and blacks and whites, something almost like a vortex. She would be far less recognizable without the juxtaposition to her more classically-painted sisters. She is without detail, and thus is positioned as a kind of ur-woman: We see her as a reflection of her peers, but within her we can also see ourselves. Such is the well-wielded power of abstraction.
Flanking the three figures are two other mirror-images: A swooping bat holds in its mouth a jagged tree branch, which in places appears to merge with the black hair of the outside-most women. Each branch culminates at its lowest point in an ultra-modern computer mouse, lined with LED light, a bit of technological accoutrement in a piece which is, otherwise, deeply naturalistic.
And then, above everything, exactly in the top-most center of the piece, like a chandelier hanging above all else, is a stained-glass window, the burning heart of Christ at its own exact center. This detail does not have a doppelganger. The stained glass effect is quite intricate, a radiating spiral of the warmest possible colors —white and white-hot yellow, softly-scorched oranges and reds— which cedes ultimately to galactic purples and blues (with some pinks and greens and other archaic colors included for texture).
Religion, nocturnal nature, botany, and high technology, all of them flanking our three central figures, and each figure captured here as incomplete but nevertheless together. Through their confluence, they verge on gestalt. And all of this set against an acid-washed green background reminiscent of cosmic ray decay.
Clearly there is a lot to unpack here.
Xhita’s Artist Description provides some clues on how we might proceed deeper into the piece. She writes:
“We are not alone, but we feel alone. We nest faith because we can't bear the silence. We make art from our tortured heart.
We are made by little pieces, even smaller than a bat or a mouse. We are connected by branches, or is it cables now?
We are a collective unconscious. A mosaic of people that, centuries before, also felt like if they were alone.”
This lengthy discussion of connection returns us back, for a moment, to Xhita’s HISTORY OF CRYPTOART triptychs. What are those pieces, with their many dozens of adjacent artists all presented in a single tableau, if not their own demonstrations of connection? Therein we find so many disparate people from this crypto art world, connected not by their upbringings or hometowns or artistic styles, but by their coordinated presence in this odd corner of the internet. Their varied compositions belie the fact that they only form the fabric of crypto art when taken altogether. They (we) are all but nodes in a system, exciting in our own rights but also limited in effect and meaning by individuality. It is the connective tissues between them (us) —some overt, some implied— which make those pieces stunning not just compositionally but thematically.
Not alone is a clear conglomeration of connective tissues. Nearly everything herein includes a mirror image of itself. The bat presented not as a solitary hunter but as paired. The human head become an extension of the natural world, and also the computer mouse, a metaphorical stand-in for online connection that is as much a growth of nature as human ingenuity is. The human being herself is not splintered but multiplied, and each presents (To us? To each other?) a root-ball as an offering, as if to say “Take hold of this yourself, and prove that you too emerge from the same systems that I do. Then, at the literal and philosophical apex of the composition, we find the underlying truth to which all others are subservient: The flaming heart of Christ is more than just cultural affectation, it is a vessel for all things, it is a light which illuminates all things, even if that light changes form depending on the person.
But while connection is presented as omnipresent, it is also herein strained. That is clear from Xhita’s description if it isn’t clear from the lack of exuberance within the piece. The tree branches, which are deadened. The bats, which are diving in an apparently hostile act. The computer mouses are unplugged, and the three figures are pale, unenthused, exposed. Superseding the radiance of the religious iconography, Xhita manifests an alienating truth: Connection between all things might exist, but recognizing that connection is too often arduous. The figures all hold tangled roots; what more pregnant metaphor for connection can there be than root systems? But none hold a completed object. Of the three here, two are dissected and the other is so abstract it becomes unrecognizable.
And perhaps this explains my fascination with Not alone, that it is complex and wary of itself, even is ultimately a celebration. Not alone captures the oh-so difficult route to a nevertheless visible summit. It is messy, difficult to parse through alone (believe me). It is overarchingly abstract even if its individual pieces are recognizable. We may struggle to find the connections between things we nevertheless know connect.
Not alone is but one important line in a much longer missive, a line we re-read again and again and again. Such repetition may be undertaken in vain, yes, but also with hope that the words may eventually contain some clearer meaning. It is Verse, meant to be studied again and again and again, deliberately vague, inviting —if not outright pleading for— continued commentary.
Next time on "Let’s Talk About Art, Baby”? One of my favorite photographers, Nastasya Parshina. Going to be a fun one.