Talk about paint jobs! Argentinian-born artist Felipe Pantone has decorated with his signature style four Alpine A110S sports coupes, three of which will be sold to the public.
Pantone and French company Alpine – a Renault group brand – collaborated on the art cars for a special event at the Monaco Grand Prix the other day.
Each A110S took Pantone a week to paint and each is a unique example of his pixelated colour gradients and bold black and white. No two cars are alike.
Pantone, aged 35, was born in Buenos Aries but moved to Spain as a boy. He began his art career at age 12, painting graffiti in Torrevieja, a town in the south of the country.
Today, he is most celebrated for his murals – which have been commissioned by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Albright Knox in Buffalo, New York – that blend the aesthetics of graffiti with digitised prismatic forms that are often modeled on a computer before their execution.
Pantone views this blending of digital and urban aesthetics as a logical melding of the modern visual lexicon. Among his many exhibitions throughout the world, Pantone has had solo shows at Studio55 in Tokyo, GR Gallery in New York, and Mirus Gallery in San Francisco.
The Alpine A110S is the go-faster version (262km/h) of the standard A110. Both run a boosted 1.8-litre four-cylinder engine mated to a seven-speed twin-clutch gearbox, but Alpine turns the boost pressure up on the S to deliver 215kW against the standard car’s 185kW.
Peak torque of 320Nm remains the same but the S hangs on to it 1400rpm longer, from 2000rpm to 6400rpm. The S is a tenth of a second quicker to 100km/h in 4.4 seconds.
Both cars weight in at around 1110kg. The S runs a more focused chassis, with 50 per cent stiffer suspension springs and 100 per cent stiffer anti-roll bars.