Vhils

Hains and Villeglé were advocates of “non-action”, favouring the usage of what already exists in the rough in “nature”, in the urban jungle. The material in question carries in each of its interstices a number of memories, history, slices of life. Almost like archeologists, Hains and Villeglé let themselves be carried by some kind of creative hypermnesia where each piece of torn paper plays the role of memory. Vik Muniz, in his turn, uses matter as a source for reflection. By creating works based on piles of rubbish or by reproducing master paintings from torn pages of magazines, he questions the commercial imagery that becomes pervasive in the art world and its market.

Vhils, who is also imbued with this nostalgia of the material, relentlessly works as a veritable magician. By chiseling, digging, cutting, tearing up everything he touches, the artist brings to light all that is hidden beneath the superficiality of our world. Little by little, he works through the layers of salvaged advertising posters with a cutter or metal plates with acid. From furniture with peeling paint found in flea markets to salvaged old doors, Vhils restores meaning to discarded things. Through a patient process of deconstruction applied to these different mediums, Vhils brings to the surface the subjects he reinvents: unknown faces and imposing buildings are seemingly revealed after being dipped in an acid bath or as a result of the chemical reactions of bleach. More than a discourse on the fragility of decomposing materials or their aesthetic quality, Vhils is focused on literally digging into walls, doors, advertising posters, metal pieces, in search of a deeper meaning, thus bringing human portraits and urban landscapes to life. Patiently carved, for instance in wood, these figures restore life to a crumbling wall or a door that has been removed from its hinges.

This decomposition, whether it involves crumbling bricks, ink undergoing a chemical reaction or peeling paint, carries this sensitive and sensual memory of a material that was once entirely new. Yet it is also something more complex where colours and texture are reinvented, a result of materials that mix and blend in a natural gradation of tones. With a distinctive texture, decaying wood or acid-etched metal become intriguing, appealing, as if they were to reveal more through touch and sight the things they have once experienced. In his attachment to the most classical techniques and armed with a chisel, Vhils is the guardian of that which is most valuable in a city: people’s lives.

The paths of memory become the ways of creation which assembles around it centrifugal and centripetal images. From these deep excisions, propaganda slogans and commercial imagery become altered, loaded with strange remains. Combining history (that of his own country, Portugal, or that of the visited country, China), technical expertise and a great aesthetic sensitivity, Vhils’s work stands as a paradoxical echo of classical painting, its dual dimension, at once lived experience and method of creation.

In China, more than anywhere else, the paths of memory are sinuous, strewn with pitfalls. Humbly and modestly, Vhils is not trying to invade the privacy of the people he meets but rather to pay tribute to a very ancient civilization. Impressively, the artist is fast to adapt to his environment. Whether creating his outdoor or indoor works, all consistent with his experience of the terrain, Vhils offers a sublimation of the raw material found in the streets of Shanghai. Like a perfectly polished mirror, each of these pieces of wood or metal provides a highly sensitive and subtle reflection of contemporary China, a land of dreams and hopes for those coming from abroad and for those who live here. An accumulation of dreams and visions that stack up to create an endless, excessive horizon of buildings.

In its simplest version, the game consists in the confrontation between three elements presented as opposites with regard to the material they are made of, the shape they take on, the symbology they embody, as well as the effects of their interaction: the rockcrushes the scissors, the scissors cut the paper, the paper covers the rock. Each of these elements reveals, in face of the others and with no ambiguity whatsoever, either a weakness or a strength; it is these absolute features that dictate the contradictory destinies of each element and the luck of each play. Through this intrinsic incompatibility of values and the complexity introduced by the triple choice a fascinating chain of dependencies and dominations is established, one that urges players to continue a speedy confrontation of random results.

Why was this game deemed as inspiration for writing this text? On the one hand, each of these elements comprises, as a material or work tool, the essential of Vhils’s artwork: the rock, broadly representing all the construction materials which he uses, integrates or recovers for his work, the urban walls which he uses for his interventions; the paper, representing the advertising posters through which Vhils, more than a new medium, establishes other lines of work; the scissors, representing the cutting and drilling tools (hammer drills, mallets, chisels), decisive in creating the images (figures, letters, abstract patterns) which are essential to convey his messages.

Yet, on the other hand, the strengths and weaknesses attributed to each of the game’s three elements are annulled in Vhils’s “formula” through the complementariness which the artist establishes between them. This transcending of the determinism of the traditional game’s rules is also an inspiring motive for the development of this text on Vhils’s work, which, in a subtle yet systematic way, undermines numerous established values. Carving and drilling, being medium and material expression, superimposing and revealing, modifying functions or recovering them are all explored by Vhils, through practical action and the construction of visual thought, in each material and based on each of the techniques he appropriates or develops, in a drift sometimes predictable, sometimes unexpected. Employing a multiplicity of resources, Vhils creates an expansible territory that marks, analyses, transforms, brings together and exposes again.

Predictable is the décollage (technique expanded in the 1960s by Parisian nouveau réalisme). Unexpected is the found (trouvée) or forged (assisted) superimposition of the posters and the intervention (by way of cutting) on their different layers, in order to create autonomous and random figurative imagery, generated from the assertive imagery of the advertising or political discourse present in the medium.

Predictable, in the context of urban or street art, is the carving of faces and other figurations and images (namely words) on that quintessential of urban media that is the wall. Unexpected is the technique of drawing/inscription by means of carving/drilling or micro-explosions that Vhils employs to achieve those images and the way in which he thus uncovers and reveals the hidden, unexpected layers of the walls.

Predictable, still in the context of urban graffiti, is the subject matter and its social content. Unexpected is how the representation of that subject is based, not on the abstract enunciation of protest values, but on the close relationship established with each social and historical reality, in a survey/analysis of the real conditions of the environment where he is to develop his intervention, on the use of the images of some of the local protagonists (residents of impoverished neighbourhoods being pulled down, people forced to resettle, the deprived, etc.) who are thus turned into the embodiment of a message, specific and generic faces simultaneously.

The levels which we have classified here as unexpected are not only what gives weight to the innovative character of Vhils’s artwork but the very guarantee of the historical and aesthetic quality of his oeuvre.

We can and should use the dual meaning of the word “matter”, referring both to the physical material (with) which the artist works (stone, paper, metal, wood, polyurethanes, etc.) and to its subject matter, because we understand how one and the other are mutually determined. By the same token, the media which are used mostly in the genealogy of his work, which is to say urban walls and posters, both determine and are determined by the contents they contain. And, even though the work’s intention subordinates its execution, there is a homology between the subjects and the materials/techniques. That is why we can assert that there is no decorative fatality in the development of the subject matter, nor, in Vhils’s current practice, works that are accomplished by simply adding or splitting up elements, but rather works that follow the compositional rules of hierarchic organisation of its internal elements.

These realities establish a new possibility for the practice of muralism. The medium is freed from all receptive passivity and integrates the constructive structure – its textures –, in the piece’s final meaning. Vhils seizes the architectural and monumental dimension which the mural has always held along with the modern and utopian political dimension which the Mexican tradition forged, integrating the fragmentation and the discontinuity of the forms, the superimposition and the ambiguity of the meanings, crucial to the understanding of contemporary discourse.

It is certain that the expansion of Vhils’s scope of action, the increase in global requests for his work and the opening up of new possibilities for commissions and markets has changed and rendered his operating procedures more complex. Presently, his endeavour is to render the initial actions of territorial marking in urban areas of dereliction and exclusion (due to neglect, abandonment or intentional isolation) compatible with the development of studio work, for galleries and collections, and with institutional projects or commissions, at times political, at times corporate. This direction has been enabling his recent research into new aesthetic solutions (recourse to relief, for instance), new working materials (polystyrene, cork, metal…), and has also obliged him to resist the temptation of creating works through the accumulation of elements or a mere game of scales. Vhils makes use of the materials like a post-Renaissance sculptor, combining different blocks to compose his work, but he also uses them like a modern sculptor, being capable of dealing with the idea and practice of industrial manufacture and mass production. And, finally, they keep him close to a certain primitivism, which can either be found in the prehistoric tradition of the incision, in its tribal continuity, or even in the spontaneity of the most basic urban markings of street art.

This is Vhils’s first solo exhibition in a museum and the most extensive display of a career which, albeit recent, has already gained a foothold on several continents. Vhils’s work has developed from a historically marginalised context (indeed, in decline since the 1970s) which holds a special political and socio-economic significance: the “South Bank”, on the left-hand side of the Tagus, the riverside dormitory and industrial belt that sprang up across from Lisbon. He was born and bred there, and there he studied and developed an artistic conscience which makes him, in his work, both highlight and unite the people with the territory, the images with the derelict architecture, the works created with the materials of those memories of a time and a place of work and life. We can ask ourselves whether when he began his adolescent, underground and subversive practice, sub-urbanity (in the canonical, modern sense in which it is most commonly used) still existed. Perhaps it was already an image of nostalgic memory of a dying world. Even today we still live in the romantic illusion of the separation between urban and rural, or in the modern illusion of the separation between urban and sub-urban when, in fact, we are immersed in a totalising city, which is to say, a city of truly super-urban dimension, with no exterior, prone to homogenising differences between the centre and the periphery, multiplying peripheries, connecting all the parts through an endless mesh, reducing the citizens (their status of freedom) to an infra-human dimension. The suffocating space and its suffocated citizens, or the reverse of urban glamour, are always present in an oeuvre where the faces appear as a type of “portraits”, in a collective identity card of the underprivileged and the rebellious, true protagonists of Vhils’s works.

With regard to exhibiting options in this museological context, it was imperative to establish a prominent presence in the exterior space: both to ensure the preservation of the link between his artwork and the street – his past as a graffiti writer –, as well as to establish his limits in yielding to the demands of a traditional exhibition room.

On the large cylinder of the Naphtha Storage Tank which rises at the entrance of the Electricity Museum – the former Central Tejo –, Vhils has created an authentic panorama (spanning a surface of some 700 m²). But let us take a closer look at how this work perverts the 19^th century model. The panorama was one of the most important devices for the creation and development of a universal(ised) urban imaginarium in the late 19^th century. Inside cylindrical structures (often ephemeral and mobile) which could reach huge dimensions, and occupying the 360º of their surface, canvasses were displayed depicting views of various monumental European cities or magnificent exotic landscapes for the satisfaction of popular curiosity and education, and even that of high society. These were veritable crowd spectacles, at once pacifying and triggering the desire to see, anticipating mass tourism.

Vhils has created a contemporary panorama: instead of closing, it opens up. Its 360º of images are revealed in the exterior of the cylinder, we need not buy a ticket in order to see them; they integrate the strategy of advertising but deny its immediate and utilitarian purpose. The landscape changed from urban and distant, monumental and scenographic to human “landscape”, a landscape of proximity and graphic solutions. In fact, instead of a wide-angle panoramic view (developed in a quasi-cinematographic tracking shot), this piece works in zoom and simulates quasi-Photoshop optical effects: a sequential montage of shots of individualised faces (portraits, albeit unidentifiable, of citizens, such as those he captured in his latest local projects, for instance in the favelas of Providência or Tabajaras, in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 and 2013, or in the district of Xiaonanmen, in Shanghai in 2012, and also in Lisbon) retains the tension of an advertising poster but personifies the human side of the city, decrying, in the exhibitionism of its excessive obviousness, the destiny of the more vulnerable protagonists of the contemporary city. In the “human zoos” of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the natives of each colonial power’s possessions were presented in their nudity to the audience’s voyeurism; these, violently impose their faces upon us like devastated landscapes.

By making us realise that there is nothing new to see (these are faces of various ages, genders, races, customs and traditions, faces which, owing to globalisation, we can find in all cities) in those faces which can be seen so clearly, Vhils shows us how, in the contemporary city, from seeing so much, we can no longer see!

Inside the museum, the exhibition starts with a black tunnel lit only by multiple screens displaying pre-recorded television footage accompanied by ambient sound compositions formed by the noises and sounds of the urban environment: the images, obliterated by vinyl stencils, reproduce faces identical to those which he carves onto walls and posters, creating thus a distancing barrier in front of the moving images of that same city.

The overarching aim of this solution of a “nocturnal” corridor connecting the outside of the building to the exhibition inside is to pervert or accelerate the Benjaminian concept of passage. In this space, meagre and dark, we are thrown into a simulation of urban acceleration (which the screens instantly evoke) establishing the short-circuit between a multiplicity of diverse realities: between what is (the) outside and what is (the) inside (of the museum); between night and day; between excess and depuration. It will be the luminous, spatial and thematic confrontation between the entire body of works being exhibited and what this passagepresents us with (the frenetic discourse of a saturated city) which will enlighten us on the key point of Vhils’s artistic thought.

Moving from a setting of darkness lit up by flashes to one of prevalent white light constitutes the first stage in the revelation of Vhils’s reflective leitmotif in this exhibition. Right in the next section, the artist presents the radical development of one of his most popular bodies of work: the dioramas.

A diorama is really the mimetic construction of a more or less distant or exotic, natural or human reality. A sort of theatre with fixed figures and props, the diorama is crucial to the 19^th century (and even 20^th century) museography of natural history or military history museums, for instance. Vhils doubly perverts this concept: firstly, he creates his models as monochromatic and abstract sculptures (close to Malevich’s small-scale models of “architectural elements” such as, for instance, the ensemble included in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou dating from 1927-32); secondly, he composes his elements in such a way that, with them (and by manipulating the lighting), he creates or exposes the same type of faces that he uses in other media. Vhils thus turns what should be a “landscape” or a “genre scene” composed of multiple elements into an authentic sculpture with chromatic, spatial, formal and material unity. It is, however, a sculpture guaranteed by the recourse to tromp l’oil and anamorphosis, resources with special decorative connotations or semantic games in the history of post-Renaissance Western art. Vhils’s dioramas simulate, in fact, city models (imagined or modified): faces emerge from the mass of buildings and streets; or it is they who decompose and pixelate into buildings and streets – either way, these pieces highlight the fusion, of which Vhils is ever insistent, between the place (the City) and its inhabitant (Man).

The ensemble’s colour (or rather its replacement with white monochromatism), accentuates the importance of the interplay of light and shade, while the geometric forms with their play on volume show us that in Vhils the path of depuration – which includessplitting up, dismembering and expanding –, should always be perceived as contradictory.

In the earlier versions (created on a much smaller scale), the vertical display of the models (as real “pictures” or wall sculptures) seemed to be Vhils’s ultimate way of perverting the urban planning-architectural concept of traditional types. Here, however, by opting for the more traditional horizontal display, Vhils reaffirms his provocative stance by making a special device (an elevated platform about 10 m high) necessary to enable the viewing of the enciphered image it presents us. It is thus displayed as a monumental piece and is, after all, a trap for the appetite for construction of all authoritarian utopias: a city that is a face or a face that is a city; except that here city and face blend into an expression of disenchantment, alienation and desertification that no gigantic scale or monumentality can hide.

The most complex area of the route appears as an “exhibition within the exhibition”. This consists of a group of nine “tower-rooms”, a set of vertical constructions in the shape of parallelepipeds, again all white, where the artist perverts the modern museological displaying concepts. In fact, Vhils simulates the fragmentary enlargement of sections of the diorama suggesting the (comical or didactic) miniaturisation of a city or the (excessive) enlargement of the pieces of a board game. And, as the structures are placed on an imaginary grid (of urban chess or a game) they are revealed after all as being display devices for works of art or artistic documents: the inside of each element opens up to the gaze and presence of the viewers who can observe within it showcases with the artist’s works – just like at an old natural science or art museum, on the pages of an encyclopedia or on the shelves of a laboratory one can observe the various study materials, divided into themes, subjects, classes, dates, styles...

In this step, we can understand Vhils’s effective path in approaching the title which he gave this exhibition: each of the techniques that he develops (dioramas, posters and other works on paper, compositions in metal, compositions in wood, videos...) is displayed assembled into its own group, with each type of work separated from the rest, as if subjected to a rigorous scientific classification like samples of different tissues or organs that compose the artist’s body of work.

Hidden and revealed by the mismatch and superimposition of the vertical profiles and the top lines of the “showcase-towers” in the room’s chessboard, we finally have access to the piece that acts as the strongest metaphor of the dissected (sectioned) body on which Vhils intends to work: the frontal section of an urban metro carriage (some five metres in length) has been cut lengthwise and crosswise; its constituent parts detached and exposed (from the epidermis which corresponds to the “sliced” cabin to the external and internal organs, and the tissues and support structures that are the headlights, the transmission shafts, the cladding, the seats…).

However, a sabotaging of the act and the scientific and medical aims of dissection takes place here: instead of learning through this meticulous act about the differences, the particularities, the specific characteristics of each part of the sectioned body, here, after everything is separated it is then rendered similar, with all differences being neutralised. In fact, a white, uniform and homogenising coating of paint covers the hundreds of parts into which the body has been fragmented, preventing us from understanding its structure and its workings. Displayed in a vertical position and expanded in that vertical space so as to configure an explosion and the dispersion of its parts, this piece by Vhils, one entirely without parallel in his earlier works, constitutes the most ambitious of his career. This is a veritable thesis-piece which, placed at the end of the elaborately staged route of this exhibition, reveals the artist’s critical, and to a certain degree disenchanted thought on the urban reality of his days: the denunciation of the city that expands, that neutralises all differences of what forms it (of what it swallows up), as if its constituent elements were already digested. A city that eliminates the specificities of the rural, between the urban and the sub-urban, which ignores the individuality of its citizens, that renders uniform the universal memory of the cities, globalising what is equal and covering with this mantle (with the symbolic whiteness of amnesia) that which is diverse. The very suggestion of the piece as an explosion frozen in space and time points us towards the understanding of a perpetuation without remission of this negative reality – the formal beauty of the piece not allowing us to forget the cold, inhuman image it conveys.

Some videos, shot at a very low speed by special cameras used in ballistics, show how, by means of controlled explosions (another of the most interesting techniques of his work), Vhils brings to life on the walls abandoned by the speculative growth of cities and the post-industrial decay of certain economic activities, solitary faces or solidary, political, poetic slogans. These pieces are the positive counterpoint to the phantasmal-body of the metro carriage: they impose a direction (in their phrases/images) while also opening up to the viewer directions for multiple (poetic/political) interpretations; they are justified by the (violent) action and are exposed in the specificity of a (non-neutral) time and space; they detonate the homogenising epidermis of reality, exposing in depth the layers of one of the elements that still preserves the memory of the cities: the walls of their buildings.

The layers

They are layers, Vhils showed me when we first discussed his work. Layers of raw material, on various walls scattered throughout the big city in its most diverse and multiple spaces. Layers of contemporary history endlessly superimposed by human action, by their production and reproduction, and by time. “The wall, in that state, is a metaphor for what has been happening to the city.” It is something profoundly rich. An organic work of art. An icon.

It was the richness of these walls, so much more impelling than any stylised space, that was to draw him to begin the change of circumstances. Walls with layers of materials, paintings, posters. Living frescos of men and the cities in an almost permanent process of evanescence; sometimes slow, others very fast, inordinately fast. A process of decay which imbues them with an immense poetic charge. A vastly powerful raw-material, therefore, in this ultimate human accomplishment called the city.

Layers which combined, from the outset, the effort and the death rattle of an industrialisation laid out along the banks of the Tagus, on a South Bank already in full crisis of recognition, in a country which is always semi-peripheral and of distanced elites. Layers that also showed the new era, one of continual and ultimately unbridled urban development; which, in the meantime, and obviously, crashed. In the course of it, the possible democracy, the possible sociology, between the end of the isotopias (equal utopias for everyone) and the beginning of the heterotopias (a different utopia for each).

Vhils’ work invites us to face important dilemmas affecting the contemporary city. A city that exploded and then imploded; that strives to be fair but is also unfair. That generates hope and unsustainability. And vice-versa. A decision is made, and the rich layers are worked. Vhils depicts mostly faces, both real and imaginary. Faces who look at us directly, with their Horus-like eyes. Faces who are not there by chance – they are the product of blending human and urban, of that landscape, those neighbourhoods, those buildings. They do not protest, but they gaze. They decry an urbanism that is barely human, trivialising; they decry the spurious idea that the city is a blank page; without layers. Old faces and young faces who come from industry, from urban development, who ultimately come from this new Matrix era and infinite heteronymy. “I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays,” said Bernardo Soares in his urban disquiet.

The sub of the urb

It is in this ambiguous setting that Vhils works. And if before he engendered incision, he now seems to search mostly for dissection. A more analytical perspective, a quest for interpretation of what this urban genome is and what it can be; this unfurling universe of sequences, structures, rhythms and expressions. This immense public space, relational sea of sensations, transactions and experiences; where so much is played out. But also, this space of injustice, of failed encounters, of incomprehensions.

The interpretation – or the dissection – of the circumstances becomes therefore crucial. You only have to think how we’ve been saying for more than a decade that over half the world’s population lives in cities; and how this is not at all true. More than half the world’s population yearns and strives to become urban and have the rights and the possibilities of an urban being. Yet we are still far from ensuring it, when so many live in such relative, or sub-urban, conditions. But perhaps even more relevant, when we still don’t really know what it is to be urban and what it is to be sub-urban. When our own interpretations are “sub”.

And thus we enter the exhibition by circumstance: through a dark tunnel with strobing screens in diffuse and voracious fractality. Whether we want to or not, it will be through it that we’ll have to interpret and dissect ourselves, build our possibilities; decide.

The huge object (diorama) that appears before us is the city’s theatre. It is us, actors of our own urban model, fused with it. Even when we think that we control it. After all, and as Borges suggested, “a man who sets himself the task of drawing the world,” and then spends his life representing it, discovers at the end of his life that “the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”

Next comes the dissection: several rooms with multiple layers; faces and gazes in pieces worked from that rich raw material extracted from the most diverse urban landscapes. Amid the profound myths of the sub there seems to be an effort of re-identification. A proposition of recognition of a “sense of place”, of a “spirit of the place”: genius loci. From the most historical and compact neighbourhoods to the most lost, nameless peripheries, but with everything and the equal right to recognition, to a narrative. Genius loci that are the product of both heavy political-economic elements and fine and subtle textures of the myriad life experiences and interactions. A vital part of the more interpretative – and narrative – capacity of the urban landscape lies in these more imprecise and more sensorial dimensions, in something which contemporary urbanism still captures very little of, as it is still too functionalist and Cartesian.

What is displayed seems white, but is not clean. The videos of the explosions demonstrate it all too clearly. Radical is the myth, and what is done in its name. But radical is, and even more, the desire for recognition. For urbanity.

The global sub

Invited by associations, local interests, artists and activists, Vhils has been working in various cities around the world. But if Morro da Providência hasn’t fallen (yet), the same cannot be said of other places rich in layers. In parallel with the Western fall, the simplifying and dehumanising urbanalisation of the city – leaving it with less variety of information and empowerment – is now extending with tremendous vigour in the “emerging” territories; it is therefore not surprising that the greatest ambiguities now exist in places such as Shanghai or Rio de Janeiro.

Vhils thus bears the tectonic clashes between global and local; between mainstream and substream. In this titanic match there is an obvious desire – that of humanising public space. That of considering that public space cannot be sterile. The desire to grant greater recognition, and thus a greater chance of justice, to each space of urbanity. To each space of humanity. The belief that only through a powerful human appropriation of public space can progress itself be humanised.

“The idea is to carry out a reflection on the current model of development,” Vhils says. Especially when, in the name of progress and comfort, an excessive standardisation and simplification of the actions over the protohuman city has been taking place. Which, paradoxically, seems to be limiting our very desires. The Prozac city, soft and sweetened, is developed with the principle of reality giving way to the principle of convenience. Here, Huxley happens to be much more correct than Orwell – it is pleasure (and not terror) that can kill desire.

However, Vhils does not put forward any alternatives or solutions: he dissects. He exposes the primordial relevance of the layers of human life in the manufacture of urbanism. He points out the importance of a sense of construction in an endless superimposition. The layers: in each and any place of the global.

The chaos

The exhibition is completed with another imposing piece: the systematised sectioning of a metro carriage. An autopsy that once again expresses the desire for analysis and interpretation. The fact that the selected object is a metro carriage reveals, in turn, a strong interpretative charge. The “metropolitan”, a name in itself with rich epistemological variations – including when referred to as “subway” – has become a quintessential meta-urban element: tunnel, connexion, motion, speed.

In an apparent rationalised landscape, the carriage is thus a symbol of the contemporary chaos which we have become. The city has turned into a giant metropolis-being, a vast spatio-relational region extended in an almost indefinite and unlimited form, not only along its physical but also its virtual spaces. And if the city has disintegrated, the same is true of us. A Pessoan multiplication of our spaces, our times, our landscapes has taken place. Amid a capitalism that is far too extreme, a post-dimensional science and technology, a fragmented state and a schizophrenic culture, what are the limits of the human? What abilities are there to explore and recognise our super-ego? What ways are there, amid these constant multiplications, to bring the city closer to the polis; and vice-versa?

Meanwhile, Vhils seems to be moving from a phase of representing mainly faces to productions of an increasingly diverse and fractal nature. There is obviously a vast energy that emanates from contemporary chaos. A form of energy which has been barely harnessed, surely; certainly hardly understood. A huge asset, one of eminently human nature, worth understanding, instead of denied and simplified. And worthy of respect, in each of its spaces and each of its rhythms. The right to the city is the right to urban life. For the city does not exist; what exists is the manufacture of urbanism.

Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, once wrote:

"In a context of absolute plurals and with a notion of social organisation that includes a plurality of actors, the political act today implies a radical insertion in the laws that structure the world. To enable adequate and multiform answers to the increasingly complex relationships between people and society and, thus (…) create the stable turmoil of things. (…) So that we turn decentralisation into coherent fractal realities with the form that originates them. So that we make the journey within the chaos that we have become."

In the late 1980s, Seixal, a suburb of Lisbon, was largely inhabited by left-leaning migrant workers.[i] Decaying murals painted a decade earlier by fledgling socialist political parties, as a result of the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, covered the urban landscape. Portugal began the process of European integration in 1986, one year before Alexandre Farto AKA Vhils was born. As a child, Vhils witnessed the dramatic change that transpired globally from Seixal. Investment and foreign aid, an effort to catch up to the rest of Europe, resulted in a building boom. Factories and warehouses along with local establishments began to disappear; apartment towers, chain restaurants and financial institutions took their place. The service sector replaced heavy industry and the primary employer. The social realist murals were covered over by advertisements for new cars and other foreign goods. The transformation spurred by the global economic growth was not just limited to Portugal. It happened all over the world as new markets in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East began to open up. Cities in northern Mexico began to resemble Texan strip malls as Chili’s and the H-E-B Grocery Stores spread across the landscape. With the exception of historic city centres, the rest of the community was fair game for massive urban redevelopment, defying local architectural styles and building traditions. With few exceptions, the unique character of small urban communities was eroded by the homogenizing effect of globalization.

Vhils’s entire practice is based on observing the process of the global metamorphoses of expansion. It is important to point out that the artist’s intention is not to condemn the transformation or offer concrete solutions but to reflect upon the situation artistically – recognizing the benefits of economic growth, cheap credit and open markets, as well as acknowledging the economic hangover of massive debt, displacement, unsustainable growth and rising political and economic inequality. It is the structure of global socio-economic development that inspires and empowers his art. As Vhils pointed out, “you solve one problem and create a thousand more.”[ii]

Vhils began interacting with the urban landscape at the early age of 13, primarily by painting graffiti on walls and trains. He refers to these actions as a form of vandalism. Much like other artists of his generation, such as his friend and collaborator JR, Vhils became aware of the limited audience of graffiti and contemporary art. In an effort to “speak to the people”, Vhils began to experiment with stencils and other forms of media. Watching taggers vandalize buildings by adding layers of illegible paint onto walls led him to develop a subversive model aimed at graffiti and vandalism. In doing so, he arguably redefined the concept of destruction.

This idea of destroying, breaking and defacing something is really correlated with the act of graffiti and participating in the public space – the vandalism of graffiti, in essence. For me, it was a way of subverting the concept of vandalism, of destruction. So when you go on a wall and you don’t just paint it and break it and at the same time you create something that people can relate to, it’s not vandalism anymore. But you’re still breaking and damaging the wall. [...] when you subvert the idea of destruction, it can be applied to a lot of things. When a great artist starts a painting, he’s destroying a white canvas. It’s destroying the harmony of a white canvas. Everything starts by destroying something that existed before…[iii]

In essence, Vhils destroys in order to create. He developed a uniquely simple technique consisting of painting, stencilling and cutting. A section of wall layered thick with paper billboards is painted white. The image is stencilled onto the painted surface. Then follows the process of cutting and removing sections of paper – going back through the layers of outdated advertisements – in order to find the right contrast of colour to formulate the image of a human face. This process was taken further by the realization that to Vhils, “walls gain importance because they absorb the changes in the city but all these changes are in layers.” Curiosity led him to dig into the walls to find out what was underneath, to reveal the rapid evolution of the city pushed by economic growth. This notion resulted in Vhils carving portraits into the sides of buildings with chisels and rotary hammers. Vhils is intent on creating art by removing and exposing layers of history that have been plastered and painted onto walls over time. With each interaction on a public wall, Vhils peels back the layers of the global transformation that has impacted all of us and inspires his practice.

It is the impact of globalization on humanity that compels Vhils to make portraits of individuals. The transformation that Vhils has observed on a macro level is felt most bitterly by individuals on a micro level. Initially, Vhils’s portraits were anonymous, faces collected off the Internet, from books and magazines, randomly rendered onto façades for the world to see. As the work has matured the artist has begun to equate a sense of place with the face. For an exhibition in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2013 he photographed an indigenous woman selling flowers in the central square. Her portrait was then etched onto a wall in the Museum of Contemporary Art three blocks away. This type of recognition empowers the portrayed with dignity.

Vhils reflects upon the quandary of whether the community shapes the individual or whether the individual shapes their community. This relationship is expressed in large-scale styrofoam dioramas. When viewed from the side, a crisp cross section of the city is visible; when viewed from above, the image of an individual’s face is revealed. These complex portraits are created by a process similar to a layered three colour stencil. Except that instead of colour variation the contrast is made solely by the use of light and shadow. The portraits are only visible when a bright light is cast on the diorama; the light brightens the tops of the tallest buildings, creates a mid tone on the medium-height buildings and casts dark shadows on the bottom level, creating the necessary contrast to reveal the portrait. The dioramas are a visual metaphor for the relationship between an individual and their community. Through this work, Vhils establishes that the two are intrinsically linked; one cannot exist without the other. Contrast is as important in making a picture, as is diversity to build a thriving community. Vhils is reminding us that the expansion of globalization and its homogenizing effect is independent of language, culture and local economics. Without all forms of diversity and contrast, everything looks the same, communities lose their character.

Towards the end of the 20^th century the West claimed a political, economic and ideological victory over socialism, allowing hubris to set in. Meanwhile, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations grew at an alarming rate, leading Vhils to turn his attention to these countries. It is now clear that the G8 has lost its monopoly on economic progress. More importantly, China’s economic muscle managed by the Communist Party presents a political and economic alternative to US hegemony. To the millions who were left behind by free trade agreements and globalization, China’s model presents a fast track to progress without the inconvenience and dysfunction of democracy. No country in the world has faced a more rapid transformation than China. Historically speaking, the economic growth is unparalleled. As American economist Larry Summers observed, when the United States was growing fastest the standard of living doubled every 30 years. China has been doubling its living standards every decade for the past 30 years.[iv] One of China’s biggest systemic advantages is autocracy. Decisions are made and policy is implemented. There is little room for discussion. The media are silenced and those who protest are punished. Conditions which present fertile ground for Vhils.

The road to progress does not benefit everyone. Millions have been left behind, more so in China than any other nation. It is the explosive growth that attracted Vhils to Shanghai, a city whose skyline has been dramatically transformed by new buildings. Some calculations estimate that more than “4,000 buildings have gone up in the last two decades.”[v] Entire neighbourhoods have been razed to make way for new construction projects and the former inhabitants are routinely displaced. By carving the faces of residents onto the walls of lost homes and abandoned buildings, Vhils began to recognize and therefore empower the community. The portraits of longtime residents appeared in demolished areas, on what were once interior walls that are now exposed. These actions began the process of equating place with identity. Rampant progress and sustained economic growth have pushed the wholesale destruction of entire neighbourhoods, heightening the effect of the transformations in China.

As the Chinese real estate market has begun to slow down, speculative buyers have stopped purchasing apartments as investment given that entire towers remain empty. “Estimates of such idle holdings range anywhere from 10 million to 65 million homes; no one really knows the exact number, but the visual impression created by vast "ghost" districts, filled with row upon row of uninhabited villas and apartment complexes, leaves one with a sense of investments with, literally, nothing inside.”[vi] Vhils compels us to reflect on the consequences of unstoppable growth and more importantly the loss of place and identity. It is not just the buildings that are being destroyed but the communities they formed and the lives of those individuals who lived within them. Furthermore, the bursting of the real estate bubble could be catastrophic not just for China but also for the recovery of the still fragile global economy.

The Chinese are not the only citizens to face growth-related displacement. The process of pacifying Rio de Janeiro’s favelas for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics began in 2010. When Vhils arrived in Morro da Providência, Rio’s oldest favela, he found many empty blocks with no houses, only the walls remained. The inhabitants had been expropriated, those who were paid received well below market value for their homes. Many residents of the favelas did not know their homes would be razed until they were marked for removal.[vii] Vhils photographed and interviewed 11 residents in two of Rio’s favelas – Morro da Providência and Ladeira dos Tabajaras –, in order to carve their portraits onto the walls of their former homes. The portraits created what Vhils refers to as “friction”. The faces did not “scream” out against the issue of displacement but addressed the problem, enabling a discussion between the media, the residents and civic authorities. Vhils sees this as a form of direct action where he is not “just commenting on something” but “actually helping the community to be heard.”[viii] The simple recognition of an individual can go a long way.

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[i] Moore, Miguel. “The Hidden Beauty of Urban Neglect: An Introduction to the Art of Alexandre Farto a.k.a. Vhils,” in Vhils, Gestalten, Berlin, 2011.

[ii] Conversation between the author and the artist. May 20, 2014.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] “What’s Wrong With Democracy?,” The Economist, March 1, 2014.

[v] Upe, Robert. “Red Hot Shanghai,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 1, 2010.

[vi] Chovanec, Patrick. “China’s Real Estate Bubble May Have Just Popped,” Foreign Affairs, December 18, 2011.

[vii] Romero, Simon. “Slum Dwellers Are Defying Brazil’s Grand Design for Olympics,” The New York Times, March 4, 2012. Web.

[viii] Conversation between the author and the artist. May 20, 2014.

In 1937, American urban historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford published an essay titled “What is a City?”,[i] addressing an audience of city planners, where he aimed to define the nature of the modern urban environment for practical purposes. In it, he concluded that a city “in its complete sense (…), is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.” Critical of the consequences of unplanned development and urban sprawl, Mumford argued that the failure to address the social function of the city was partially to blame for a spate of sociological issues affecting modern societies. He advocated that housing and city planning should be primarily aimed at catalysing the human potential, actively contributing towards developing a more organic, balanced relationship between people and their living environments.

Describing the modern city as a “stage-set” where the social drama unfolds, while laying emphasis on the pivotal importance of community values, Mumford’s ideas have been resonating with urban planners, social researchers, and visual artists ever since. In fact, since the dawn of the modern city at the turn of the twentieth century, no other subject has exerted greater fascination among the latter than the urban environment and its effects on the human condition.

Among the plethora of names to have emerged over the last decade from the growing urban art scene, Portuguese visual artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils (b. 1987) is well-attuned to the notion that the human condition today is fundamentally linked to the urban reality. Having witnessed the fast-paced, de-regulated transformations that shaped Portugal’s sprawling suburbs in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the artist’s world view was to become shaped by the awareness that the rise of these massified, poorly-planned conurbations was a symbol of a new global paradigm which has brought major benefits but also devastating consequences to the well-being of individuals and communities across the world. At a time when the world’s urban population has surpassed that of rural areas (accounting for 54% of the total global population in 2014, according to the UN), Vhils has been developing an ongoing reflection on contemporary urban societies and the fertile complexity of the modern city which has matured into a significant global statement on the present-day human condition.

Nowhere is this better expressed than in the artist’s Scratching the Surface project, based on his groundbreaking wall-carving technique, which has been met with critical acclaim. First presented to the world in 2007, its premiss is rooted in the concept of working with the city itself as the prime material. In the intervening years, an impressive number of pieces (around 200, according to the artist’s archives) have been carved in bas-relief into façades and walls in a multiplicity of locations around the globe – a legion of poignant, expressive portraits that form a critical reflection on present-day urban life and human identity. For Vhils too, the city and its public space are also the quintessential “stage-set”, the perfect location to materialise his interactions with the rest of the cast that bring the social drama to life. This reflection is also brought about by the artist’s practice of working both outdoors (the city) and indoors (the gallery), using both as complementary settings while establishing material and conceptual links between them.

Having begun his exploration of the suburban landscapes of his hometown of Seixal, lying across the river from Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, when he first came into contact with graffiti culture at the age of ten, Vhils has been interacting with the urban environment ever since. His interest in the use of public space had sprung up from a fascination with urban visual culture and, by the age of 13, he was well-immersed in the illegal graffiti writing scene, meticulously planning missions to paint his letter-based designs on the side of trains, walls, and other surfaces. After using a number of other graffiti tags, in the early 2000s he finally settled on the name Vhils, simply put together based on the calligraphic and typographic potential of its letters.

Enabling him to express what he saw as a creative takeover of public space, graffiti writing was to prove pivotal in shaping Vhils’s ideas and future artistic practice. The aesthetics of vandalism he has been developing since has its roots in the defacing nature of the activity. His extreme approach to art, illustrated by his use of abrasive, destructive tools and techniques, derives from the act of writing or carving his name into urban surfaces with tools such as glass cutters or carbide-tipped drill bits, or marker pens filled with ink and brake fluid, acetone, leather dye, or etching acid. Feeling limited by the closed-circle logic of graffiti culture, however, he began experimenting with other media around 2003, chief among which was the technique of stencilling. This discovery not only enabled him to broaden the scope of his creations, guiding him towards more figurative artwork that reached out to a wider audience, it also enabled him to divide the creative process into two distinct phases: conception and execution. This would help him to focus more on the experimental stage of things, giving rise to an increasingly-ambitious interaction with source materials and techniques.

With this new approach, Vhils also began perceiving the urban space as the complex, conflicting reality that it is. Looking back on his earliest memories, he recalled the fascination he had felt as a child with the fading remains of the large number of political murals and inscriptions that graced the walls of Portugal during the highly-politicised period that followed the 25 April 1974 revolution, which had brought democracy to the country. The unintended imbrications and juxtapositions between these and the colourful graphics of contemporary advertising that followed suit in the 1990s, making use of the same public space, created a visual contrast that was both fascinating and revealing of the changes the country had undergone in the course of the previous decades. Seeing how these walls had grown thicker over time with the addition of further layers of content (murals, advertising, graffiti, paint – in a perpetual cycle of transformation), he became aware of their status as repositories of history, their peeling layers offering a glimpse into fragments of the recent past. Aided by his work with stencils, he also began perceiving this concept of layers as a schematic view that helped him dissect and study the myriad of strata that compose reality, including people and their formative experiences.

This realisation made him stop seeing urban walls simply as static, lifeless surfaces. He began viewing them instead as organic-like mediums that absorb and retain traces of the events of a given place, soaking up the local character and history. Thus armed with a new understanding of the city and its walls, Vhils began reflecting on the nature of contrast and its importance to both the visual arts and the dissemination of visual communication in the public space.

His first experiments led him to use paste-ups, stickers and other homemade paper-based media to spread images and graphics on a repetitive scale, mirroring the logic of advertising seen in the streets. He also started painting with increasingly complex stencils, creating large-scale compositions of cityscapes and other urban-related subject matter. However, despite this new approach, the notion of adding yet more layers to city walls proved unsatisfying. It also lacked the edge and urge he experienced with the more vandalistic nature of graffiti. Inspired by Lisbon’s peeling, decaying walls, he began experimenting with the notion of reverse stencilling, creating through the removal of layers instead of their addition. Coupled with the notion of creative destruction, intrinsic to graffiti, he set off in a new direction based on the subtraction of the layers already present in walls and other surfaces, first explored by cutting through thick amalgamations of advertising posters which he removed from hoardings. The results were to prove a powerful new concept and direction for his artwork.

Despite being based on the notion of graffiti vandalism, the concept of creative destruction also proved key in his approach to the subject matter he wanted to explore: the contemporary nature of the city and its underlying ideological framework. It also mirrored the theory of economic innovation and the business cycle of the same name advanced by Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, which describes a necessary, ongoing cycle of creation and destruction in the economic structure that gives rise to development, innovation, and change, critical to the advancement of capitalism.

Playing with these two conceptual approaches, Vhils began experimenting with increasingly destructive methods of creation around 2005, such as using nitric acid or household bleach to eat into portraits painted on paper, which were to form one of his first series of works. This gathering of works that share affinities into series established a pattern he has kept to. Dating from 2006, the “Unknown Icons Series” depicts several anonymous faces achieved by applying bleach and acid onto a paper surface covered with a layer of fountain pen ink. It constitutes one of his first efforts to express the complexity of the formation of identity amid the alienating conditions of contemporary urbanised societies. In 2006 he also began working with screen printing, subverting the classic technique by replacing one layer of ink with acid or bleach, creating friction between mechanical and manual processes of creation, and contrasting the concepts of uniformity and differentiation. Both these techniques have been continuously used by the artist to this day. This approach can be seen too in the “Empty Faces Series” (2007), one of the first to follow the practice of cutting and tearing through amalgamations of advertising posters which have been neutralised with a coating of white paint, forming an ongoing reflection on the impact of consumerism on the formation of identity.

Working with the underlying substrate of material reality saw him understand this new subtractive approach both as a form of contemporary urban archaeology and a process of dissection, at once a poetic search for a lost essence and a clinical analysis of key constituent elements. Digging into the fabric of our material culture, Vhils thus began exposing what lies beneath the superficiality of things, highlighting the process of fast-paced transformation and the culture of obsolescence that has taken over the cycle of production and consumption. Vhils was also to realise how, whether it is technological advancement or urban renewal schemes that treat people like commodities, this fast-paced change that leaves us little time to adjust and absorb can have devastating consequences on individuals and communities, depriving them of the things that give significance to their lives. However, this approach is not rooted in a nostalgic, primitivist yearning for the simplicity of the past. In his view, this poetic exposure of the substrate is important to highlight the ephemeral nature intrinsic to all things while also contributing to the study of the past, helping us to better understand the present and anticipate the future.

Valuing this transience also serves to underline the human dimension present in his work, an element further emphasised by his recurrent use of the portrait. This not only highlights the importance of the individual in the face of an overwhelming urban environment and the forces that give shape to it, but also aims at restoring value and dignity to unknown, ordinary people, helping bring their invisibility to the fore, laying out the simplicity of their lives and daily struggles in sharp contrast with the over-glamorised figures displayed in advertising and the media. A proposition that is evident in most of the series that form the artist’s bodies of work spanning a variety of mediums, from cut and torn advertising posters to acid-etched metal plates, from sculpted city walls to hand-carved wooden doors.

In the scope of the Scratching the Surface project, the carving of portraits into dilapidated buildings and derelict sites in the urban space is also used to symbolically restore a degree of humanity to the city, a statement on both the plasticity of identity and the socio-economic decline that gives rise to urban decay. By choosing to work with these neglected sections of the urban fabric, Vhils is also pointing out the entropic direction in which contemporary urban societies are moving. The main objective, however, is not the fetishisation of the ruin but rather the accentuation of the ephemeral, to stress the inevitability of material decay and, by extension, our very own transience.

Chipping away at these architectural structures and some of their material elements (from stucco and bricks to wooden doors and window shutters), Vhils introduces a silent and critical element of his own into the city space, a meaningful pause in this chaotic realm of turmoil and dissonance, a certain poetic tension aimed at captivating the passers-by, leaving them with a charged, emotional impression of alterity and interchange, a pivotal concept in this age of increased saturation, dilution of identity, and homogenisation.

Unlike the bleak industrial landscapes seen in Michelangelo Antonioni’s acclaimed feature film Il Deserto Rosso (1964), for instance, which both precipitate and mirror the main character’s unease and alienation, Vhils’s blending of cityscapes and human portraits aims at the very opposite – to address the issue of fragmentation and social alienation brought on by the neurosis-inducing city life and architecture by reintroducing a human element that can act as a symbolic, poetic catalyst to help rebalance the beauty of the space and thus generate a new dimension of well-being. Yet, like Antonioni, Vhils also addresses the issue in an ambiguous way: despite the evident critique, he also lays claim to the poetic beauty present in these harsh, built-up environments, playing with it while highlighting its cultural significance and impact on people and communities.

This exercise in memory and reflection is based on creating contrast and friction between two types of components derived from the urban context: a material element and a human element. The material component, such as walls, wooden doors, and posters, constitutes a statement on the increased uniformity affecting our world as a result of the process of globalisation. In this sense, the materials are very much the same regardless of their provenance, and can be seen as a fixed element. The human element, on the other hand, is the variable in the equation, formed by the people portrayed by the artist and regarded as the unique feature. The aim of this reflection is to reveal how, in a globalised context, the increased homogenisation of material culture is forcing us to become growingly alike, eroding pre-existent cultural differences and specificities. By extension, this approach to the urban environment and its elements is a meaningful, passionate reflection on the clash between uniqueness and uniformity, and the underlying tensions between local and global realities.

Lying at the core of this analysis is the power and impact of advertising, its takeover of public space, and the driving forces behind consumer culture. Most of the artist’s bodies of work have been addressing this issue in one way or another, mirroring the ideas of French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard on how the excess of signs and meaning present in the urban discourse has been causing an effacement of reality. In this light, Vhils’s series based on the mutilation and reinterpretation of amalgamations of advertising posters removed from the streets constitute a significant statement on how this dominant visual discourse of the urban landscape has become a major factor in (de)forming and diluting the identity of both the city and its citizens.

Since 2012, much of Vhils’s practice in a plurality of media has been addressing the effects of this saturation and dissonance present in the dominant visual discourse by evolving into the sphere of fragmentation and abstraction. This is patent in works with advertising posters (in series such as “Annihilation”, “Sobreposição”, or “Overload”), works with acid-etched metal plates (such as the “Anagrama Series”), and works with salvaged wooden elements (such as the “Ataxia Series”, “Decompose Series”, or “Lancetar Series”). The wood-based “Ataxia Series” (started in 2012), for instance, explores the idea of dismemberment and dissection while presenting a rearrangement of several components that represent the multiplicity of stimuli we are continuously bombarded with in the public space: images and graphic elements in the form of information, advertising, and visual clutter. It also delves into the notions of increased uniformity, loss of identity, and social alienation.

Mirroring this dissonance, the faces depicted in these and other, subsequent series have become increasingly lost to the visual noise which, until 2012, had been a mere decorative element used in the background. The symbolic significance of this effacement lies in the notion of reciprocal shaping – a concept expressing the fundamental relationship between the individual and the surrounding physical environment by which both develop a shared character. As this dialectical interchange becomes increasingly discordant in the global urban context, Vhils began depicting the human element as an almost abstract component, yet another undifferentiated constituent in the vast composition of the cities we have built on this path that leads further and further away from nature.

An eloquent materialisation of this concept can be seen in the styrofoam-based pieces developed in the “Diorama Series”, first presented in 2012. This established a three-dimensional proposition that inverted the trend Vhils had been following up until then, based both on bas-relief carving and the use of destructive techniques. Each piece presents a sculptural panorama which can be read either as a face or a cityscape seen from above, forming an intricate architecture which is brought to life by means of lighting and a delicate balance in contrast. The elaborate interplay of light and shade also constitutes a reflection on reality and illusion, a meaningful consideration on the acute contrast between the glitzy façade exhibited by the dominant model of socio-economic development and the gloomy shadow cast in its wake – the oppressive, overbuilt, and intoxicating environment it is often responsible for.

This conceptual approach to cause and effect is made shockingly evident in his art video series based on the use of explosives which developed as a radical complement to his wall-carving technique. First presented in 2011 with the “Detritos Series”, the concept developed as a reaction to the effects of the global financial crisis that started shaking the world in 2008. Taking our urban societies as the “stage-set” where the social drama unfolds, the series of three videos constitutes a powerful metaphor on the current system’s volatile nature and its explosive effects on social reality. The slow-motion footage (shot with a high-speed digital camera) would also mark the artist’s first major venture into the world of film directing, a field which has seen him in the intervening years shoot music videos for names such as Portuguese bands and musicians Orelha Negra (“M.I.R.I.A.M.”, 2011), Buraka Som Sistema (“Stoopid”, 2014), and Carlão (“A Minha Cena”, 2015), as well as Irish rock giants U2 (“Raised by Wolves”, 2014).

The title of the “Detritos Series” (detritus, in English) plays not only with the concept of rubble and ruin but also with the notion of waste – a pivotal concept for Vhils, who makes extensive use of discarded materials which are given a new lease of life when re-contextualised in the space of the gallery. Despite only lasting a second or two, the video recording enables the viewer to witness the complexity of the explosions in slow-motion. Yet, however powerful the resulting wall piece may be, the artistic statement contained in both this and the subsequent series engaging with the same technique, such as the “Pulsão Series” (2014), lies in the process itself: the controlled explosion and what it represents. Following the concept of creative destruction, these explosions contain two distinctive moments of expression: one representing a stage of violence and destruction, closely followed by another of creation and birth.

The symbolical significance of this volatility, the explosions and ensuing debris is also contained in the way the globalised model of development operates with regard to construction. As Vhils’s work began expanding to other corners of the world, he came to realise how the urban transformations he had witnessed during his childhood in Portugal were part of a wider, transnational trend which sees undifferentiated, functionalist architecture and similar urban planning schemes being implemented in diverse locations, imprinting a homogenised environment which is blind to local characteristics and cultures. In this light, the artist’s community-related projects, developed in locations such as Portugal (Bairro de Santa Filomena, 2007; Rabo de Peixe, 2013 and 2015), China (Shanghai, 2012), and Brazil (Morro da Providência, 2012; Ladeira dos Tabajaras, 2013), whether in connection with issues such as property speculation or urban renewal and gentrification programmes (often based on forced evictions and involuntary resettlements), look into how this dominant trend imposes the same market-driven approach to spatial planning and redevelopment regardless of national, cultural or historical specificities, thus giving rise to increasingly uniform cities. This strategy can clash violently with local realities and interests, creating serious social and economic asymmetries and producing devastating consequences for the people and the communities affected.

With the objective of highlighting this clash between local and global realities, Vhils has also adopted a practice of transference applied to both source materials and the subject matter he works with. This sees him presenting work in one country with recourse to materials sourced in others, highlighting the uniformity contained in this fixed element and how it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between the material reality of one city and that of another. This cultural exchange also encompasses visual and graphic patterns displayed by advertising, and other decorative elements. On another level, it also includes people, moved from their original local contexts to new destinations, with each specific dissection transcending the particularities of its immediate reality and becoming instead part of a broader global reflection.

This conceptual migration of people establishes a correlation between human identities that imprints a continuity between various series and bodies of work. The transposition of people also expresses the notions of migration and the transnationalisation of labour which, according to Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen, who has been studying the phenomenon of globalisation and first advanced the concept of “global cities”, is one of the constitutive processes of globalisation. According to Sassen, the new transnational reality of the global paradigm raises many new issues related to the age-old tensions between the various actors that make use of the city. “If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations,” she writes, “then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions.”[ii]

The narrative which Vhils has been composing is based on a critical, yet deeply interested reflection on life in the urban “stage-set” at this complex moment in history. His work mirrors not only his aesthetic propositions but also his personal concerns for the well-being and future of humanity. Highlighting both the positive and the negative aspects of present-day urban societies in the global reality, it seeks to promote awareness and discussion on these engaging issues and act as a catalyst for change and improvement. As Lewis Mumford put it, “The physical organization of the city may deflate this drama or make it frustrate; or it may, through the deliberate efforts of art, politics, and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action of the play.”[iii]

In the light of Vhils’s ongoing work and reflection, the stage formed by the modern city can also be understood as a place of expression, density, exchange, consumption, settlement, construction, boundaries, and mutation.

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[i] Mumford, Lewis “What is a City?”, in The City Reader, Fourth Edition, eds. R. Legates and F. Stout. London: Routledge, 2007.

[ii] Sassen, Saskia “The Global City: Introducing a Concept”, in The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Winter/Spring 2005, Vol. XI, Issue 2.

[iii] Mumford, Lewis “What is a City?”, in The City Reader, Fourth Edition, eds. R. Legates and F. Stout. London: Routledge, 2007.

For the youths in the American cities of Philadelphia and New York who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, pioneered the art form known today as graffiti – referred to by them simply as writing –, the act of inscribing their names on public surfaces was a way of overcoming the debilitating anonymous condition which the urban environment, in all its overcrowded, stifling greyness, relegated them to. Graffiti was, and still is, all about rising above the mediocrity of your surroundings by making a name for yourself – by attaining fame. In other words: validation, respect, acknowledgement. To them, it was an act of existential emancipation and defiance, a rebellious kick in the loins of the city – and the social order it stood for – that ignored them and gave them few life prospects. It was a way – a highly creative, colourful and aesthetically minded one – of making themselves visible amid the rubble and ruin of its precarious neighbourhoods, the imposing verticality of its drab walls, the entropic condition of a declining system that had left them behind.

What started out as a simple game created by youngsters in a bid to write their aliases in as many locations as possible quickly gained a momentum of its own. Spurred on by the fierce competition that emerged between the growing number of practitioners, graffiti developed into a sophisticated visual language that slowly spread to other cities across the United States and, eventually, made its way around the globe. Like many other subcultures, graffiti proved an alluring escape from the pains of growing up in a dysfunctional world for countless youths across the world. Providing an intoxicating blend of raw creativity, dexterity, risk, urban exploration, vandalism, and subversiveness neatly wrapped up in a single package, it has been galvanising the few and antagonising the many ever since.

Having changed the landscapes of our cities for ever, graffiti has contributed appreciably towards shaping the modern visual discourse through its direct impact on a broad range of creative fields, including contemporary art, graphic design, illustration, advertising, photography, or fashion, among many others. Acknowledged as a significant and valid art movement today, it has earned a key place in contemporary visual culture while having also blended with other fringe street-based visual phenomena to give rise to the contemporary form known as street art – an eclectic crossover of visual techniques, media and styles which make use of the city’s public space in what is perceived as a more engaging and attractive way to the community at large.

Graffiti’s appeal also proved irresistible to a young Alexandre Farto (b. 1987). Growing up in the industrialised suburban town of Seixal, located on the south bank of the river Tagus opposite the city of Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, he became aware of it during the country’s first graffiti boom circa 1997. Sprouting like mushrooms on the walls along the route he took daily to school, he was immediately captivated by its underlying mystique, its secretive and illegal nature, its bold takeover of the public space. Over the next two years he would watch and observe it with fascination from the outside, drawing and experimenting with various tags in his notebooks and meeting up with other like-minded kids. Then, in late 1999, he was to give his first real steps in the scene under the name Hopio (sometimes shortened to Hop). By the following year, aged 13, he was devoting every minute of his day to his development as a graffiti writer. By 2002, now writing Hion, he had become seriously immersed in the hardcore illegal graffiti scene, skipping lunch to buy spray paint and venturing out late at night without his parents’ knowledge to paint trains in local rail yards. In 2003 he began testing out a new tag, one by which the world would come to know him: Vhils – a street moniker with no significance beyond the sequence of letters, chosen for their calligraphic and typographic potential.

Graffiti was to become the foundation of his artistic practice. Vhils himself regards his time as a prolific graffiti writer as the most important formative years in his career. The concept of the aesthetics of vandalism he has been pursuing over the years has its roots in this adrenalin-fuelled, outlaw activity. His interest in abrasive, destructive tools and techniques also stems from the days spent carving his name on city surfaces with sharp objects like glass cutters, spark plugs or carbide-tipped drill bits; or highly corrosive products that eat into materials, like marker pens filled with ink and brake fluid, acetone, leather dye or etching acid. Graffiti was to shape his worldview, giving him a plethora of skills and knowledge such as how to navigate the city’s backstreets and non-places to gain a better understanding of its structure and functioning, the importance of planning and organising missions and projects down to the last detail, the importance of choosing locations with high visibility in order to create as bigger impact as possible, or how to use the public space and visual communication tools effectively in order to communicate and interact with an audience across the city.

Living close to one of Lisbon’s main suburban railway lines, he devoted himself to spending hours on end studying the yards where trains are kept after hours, noting down in rigorous detail his observations of when they pulled in, when they were serviced and cleaned, when they pulled out, when the security teams did their rounds and when they changed their shifts. An art form in its own right, this knowledge and the fruits that derived from it – the number of trains he was hitting – soon earned him the respect of his peers and a place in two of the most prestigious Lisbon-based train writing cliques: the 2S and 3D crews. As he grew up, he eventually began venturing further afield, painting trains on other lines around Lisbon, then in other locations around Portugal and, later still, around Europe following the iconic Interrail route across the continent.

Yet, despite its overall importance, graffiti was not the only major factor contributing towards the development of his future ideas, concepts and techniques. Another influential factor lies in what he observed in the streets of Portugal, and especially in the old industrial areas around Seixal, during his youth. This was the contrast created between what remained of the impressive political murals that had sprung up after the 25th April 1974 revolution – which overthrew the conservative dictatorship that had oppressed Portugal since 1926 – and the new graphics displayed by capitalist advertising which had since taken over the public space. The resulting superimposition created a fascinating visual dialogue, a confrontation between two opposing ideological frameworks forming chance arrangements and impromptu compositions.

He was fascinated by how this imbrication of layers would start to peel over time, revealing fragments of the recent past. He began perceiving urban walls as repositories of history, surfaces that reflected the organic-like quality of the city – absorbing changes, growing thicker over time with layer upon layer of murals, adverts, graffiti, new coats of paint, in an endless cycle of transformation. He further realised how this notion of layers could be applied to everything: a schematic view that helps dissect and understand the many strata that compose reality. A concept which he also applies to people and their formative experiences.

Vhils would also become aware of the notion of contrast – the interplay of light and shade that gives clarity, definition, and meaning to all things. He was to further explore this key element when he became interested in broadening the scope of his street work beyond letter-based graffiti and began experimenting with other media around 2003, chief among which was the technique of stencilling. His first experiments led him to use paste-ups, stickers, and other homemade paper-based media to spread images and graphics on a repetitive scale, mirroring the logic of advertising seen in the streets. He also started painting with increasingly complex stencils, creating large-scale compositions of cityscapes and other urban-related subject matter.

However, despite this new approach, the notion of adding yet more layers to city walls proved unsatisfying. It also lacked the edge and urge he experienced with the more vandalistic nature of graffiti. Inspired by his observations of how the old, crackly walls of Lisbon would shed their surface layers over time, offering a glimpse into what lay hidden beneath, he began experimenting with the notion of reverse stencilling, creating through the removal of layers instead of their addition. This enabled him to combine the notion of creative destruction derived from graffiti vandalism with the idea of exposure that gave rise to a new direction based on the subtraction of the layers already present in walls and other surfaces.

Another crucial element that was to have an enduring impact on Vhils were the huge transformations brought on by the expansion of Lisbon’s suburbs, with the mass construction of buildings and urban infrastructure engulfing the once serene and colourful countryside. He would later come to realise that the voracious urban sprawl which swept Portugal during the 1980s and 1990s, after the country joined what was to become the European Union, was the expression of a new global paradigm directing contemporary urban societies worldwide towards the same uniform ideal. An ideal responsible for creating oversized, often inhuman cities that devour limited resources and generate huge amounts of waste while also giving rise to a wide schism between poverty and wealth. An ideal which has brought major benefits but also devastating consequences to the well-being of individuals and communities across the world.

In 2004 he also started organising small exhibitions with other graffiti writers interested in expanding the scope of their work into more formal settings. In the following year, these would culminate in the creation of the “Visual Street Performance” (VSP), an annual group show formed by members of the LEG graffiti crew into which he had been admitted on the occasion of his 18th birthday. The works and installations he showed at this first edition of the VSP ended up catching the attention of Vera Cortês, who ran one of Lisbon’s most prestigious contemporary art galleries and who invited Vhils to join her roster of artists. This gave him the opportunity to showcase his studio work in a gallery for the first time in the form of a small solo installation with the title “Compact Life”, which was open to the public for a week in March 2006 – a reflection on the urban environment and some of its structural components that would set the tone for his future solo exhibitions.

Playing around with the concept of creative destruction, Vhils had been experimenting with increasingly destructive methods of creation since 2005, such as using nitric acid or household bleach to eat into portraits painted on paper, which were to form one of his first series of works. He also began experimenting with etching and other engraving techniques, learning the fundamentals and then subverting them in a bid to come up with original approaches. Dating from 2006, the “Unknown Icons Series” depicts several anonymous faces achieved by applying bleach and acid onto a paper surface covered with a layer of fountain pen ink. It constitutes one of his first efforts to express the complexity of the formation of identity amid the alienating conditions of modernity.

In 2006 he also began working with screen printing, subverting the classic technique by replacing one layer of ink with acid or bleach, creating friction between mechanical and manual processes of creation, and contrasting the concepts of uniformity and differentiation. Such techniques have been continuously used by the artist to this day. This new approach can be seen too in the “Empty Faces Series” (2007), one of the first to follow the practice of cutting and tearing through amalgamations of advertising posters which have been neutralised with a coating of white paint, forming an ongoing reflection on the impact of consumerism on people’s identities.

This work with advertising posters was to prove a powerful new concept and direction for his artwork, one which he would subsequentially transfer and apply to walls, where he was to take up the drills, hammers and chisels that have since become his hallmark. The use of these destructive means was also to irrevocably link the brutality of his artistic process with the poetic expression of its results. From then on, the medium became the message; the stencil, a window through which to reach into the depths of matter and time.

Nowhere is this better expressed than in the artist’s “Scratching the Surface” project, based on his groundbreaking bas-relief carving technique applied to walls which has been met with critical acclaim. First presented to the world in November 2007 – during the opening of the “Visual Street Performance” group show in Lisbon –, its premiss is rooted in the concept of working with the city itself as the prime material. In the intervening years, an impressive number of pieces (over 250, according to the latest count) have been carved by the artist into façades and walls in a multiplicity of locations around the globe – a legion of poignant, expressive portraits that form a critical reflection on present-day urban life and human identity.

His work can be thus seen as a process of exploration, a poetic search for a lost essence which this carving technique – described by Vhils himself as a form of contemporary urban archaeology – symbolically aims to bring to light, to make visible. Digging into the surface layers of our material culture Vhils exposes what exists beyond the superficiality of things, restoring meaning and beauty to the discarded dimensions that lie buried beneath the more recent tiers. This process also highlights the ephemeral nature intrinsic to all things, emphasising the poetics of decay and replacement, destruction and creation, which the present model of development and its programmed obsolescence of goods has accelerated beyond reason in contemporary life.

As brutal as his process may seem, Vhils mostly aims to limit his intervention to a mere scraping of the surface of the materials. His is meant to be but a small contribution; just another element among the many that compose the substance with which he is working. The aim is to work with nature, not against it. To incorporate its fragility and natural decay into each piece, to collaborate with that which gives substance to chaos: time, randomness and entropy. Actively encouraging them, making them part of his work. It is this that dictates the final form of a piece – what patterns, colours or shapes might emerge from beneath the rubble left behind.

Valuing this ephemerality also serves to imprint his work with an organic, palpable character, a scale by which to measure it that is easy to understand during our limited lifespans. It reduces his artwork to something that can be both observed and absorbed during our lives. Vhils’ art is essentially an art to keep us company, an art for our times.

Vhils was also to realise how, whether it is technological advancement or urban renewal schemes that treat people like commodities, this fast-paced change that leaves us little time to adjust and absorb can have devastating consequences on individuals and communities, depriving them of the things that give significance to their lives. However, this approach is not rooted in a nostalgic, primitivist yearning for the simplicity of the past. In his view, this poetic exposure of the substrate is important to highlight the ephemerality that underlies all things while also contributing to the study of the past, helping us to better understand the present and anticipate the future.

Playing with this transience also serves to underline the human dimension present in his work, an element further emphasised by his recurrent use of the portrait. This not only highlights the importance of the individual in the face of an overwhelming urban environment and the forces that give shape to it, but also aims at restoring value and dignity to unknown, ordinary people, helping bring their invisibility to the fore, laying out the simplicity of their lives and daily struggles in sharp contrast with the over-glamorised figures displayed in advertising and the media. A proposition that is evident across most of the artist’s work.

In the scope of the “Scratching the Surface” project, the carving of portraits into dilapidated buildings and derelict sites in the urban space is also used to symbolically restore a degree of humanity to the city, a statement on both the plasticity of identity and the socio-economic decline that gives rise to urban decay. By choosing to work with these neglected sections of the urban fabric, Vhils is also pointing out the entropic direction in which contemporary urban societies are moving. The main objective, however, is not the fetishisation of the ruin but rather the accentuation of the ephemeral, to stress the inevitability of material decay and, by extension, our very own transience.

Playing with this textural heritage imprinted into the city’s material fabric in a permanent cycle of superimposition and obliteration, the legion of expressive bas-relief portraits Vhils has been chiselling into walls around the globe offer us a poetic respite from the surrounding chaos – a solid concreteness that speaks of the fundamentals of life; a neutral, silent space that provides comfort amid the inexorable dissonance disgorged by the city. Yet, despite their imposing solidity, these pieces are devised to be slowly reabsorbed by the landscape and medium from which they were made to emerge.

Poetically rendered in a variety of media – from cut and torn advertising posters to acid-etched metal plates, from sculpted walls to hand-carved wooden doors and bleach-eaten screen prints –such exercises in memory and reflection are based on creating contrast and friction between two types of components derived from the urban context: a material element and a human element. The material component, such as walls, wooden doors, and posters, constitutes a statement on the increased uniformity affecting our world as a result of the process of globalisation. In this sense, the materials are very much the same regardless of their provenance, and can be seen as a fixed element. The human element, on the other hand, is the variable in the equation, formed by the people portrayed by the artist and regarded as the unique feature. The aim of this reflection is to reveal how, in a globalised context, the increased homogenisation of material culture is forcing us to become growingly alike, eroding pre-existent cultural differences and specificities. By extension, this approach to the urban environment and its elements is a meaningful, passionate reflection on the clash between uniqueness and uniformity, and the underlying tensions between local and global realities.

Since 2012, much of Vhils’ practice has been addressing the effects of this saturation and dissonance present in the dominant visual discourse by evolving into the sphere of fragmentation and abstraction. This is patent in works with advertising posters (in series such as “Annihilation”, “Sobreposição”, “Overload”, “Matter”, “Attrition”, or “Diffuse”, among others), works with acid-etched metal plates (such as the “Anagrama” and “Blight” series, or the three-dimensional “Rust Series”), and works with salvaged wooden elements (such as the “Ataxia Series”, “Decompose Series”, or “Lancetar Series”).

The wood-based “Ataxia Series” (started in 2012), for instance, explores the idea of dismemberment and dissection while presenting a rearrangement of several components that represent the multiplicity of stimuli we are continuously bombarded with in the public space: images and graphic elements in the form of information, advertising, and visual clutter. It also delves into the notions of increased uniformity, loss of identity, and social alienation.

This concept would be further developed over the years, culminating in the large-scale installation presented in 2018 at Vhils’ solo show at Le Centquatre-Paris with the title “Babel”. Presenting an imposing assortment of various subjects and objects sourced from different cities around the world, it sought to stand as a symbolic present-day Tower of Babel, expressing the concept of connections and disconnections present in the contemporary global urban context. The resulting composition presented a patchwork of disparate elements taken from various locations combined into a single unit, inviting the viewers to reflect on the convergence of people and discourses across the globe that coalesce through their shared immersion in the contemporary urban experience.

Expressing this dissonance, the faces depicted in these and other, subsequent series have become increasingly lost to the visual noise which, until 2012, had been a mere decorative element used in the background. The symbolic significance of this effacement lies in the notion of reciprocal shaping – a concept expressing the fundamental relationship between the individual and the surrounding physical environment by which both develop a shared character. As this dialectical interchange becomes increasingly discordant in the global urban context, Vhils began depicting the human element as an almost abstract component, yet another undifferentiated constituent in the vast composition of the cities we have built on this path that leads further and further away from nature.

An eloquent materialisation of this concept can be seen in the styrofoam-based pieces developed in the “Diorama Series”, first presented in 2012. This established a three-dimensional proposition that inverted the trend Vhils had been following up until then, based both on bas-relief carving and the use of destructive techniques. Each piece presents a sculptural panorama which can be read either as a face or a cityscape seen from above, forming an intricate architecture which is brought to life by means of lighting and a delicate balance in contrast. The elaborate interplay of light and shade also constitutes a reflection on reality and illusion, a meaningful consideration on the acute contrast between the glitzy façade exhibited by the dominant model of socio-economic development and the gloomy shadow cast in its wake – the oppressive, overbuilt, and intoxicating environment it is often responsible for.

This concept has also been employed in two similar bodies of work operating with the same principles – the pieces in cork (such as the work “Contraste”, created in 2013), and the cement or concrete cast sculptures he has been producing since 2016 (“Concrete Series”, “Compressed Series”, or even the smaller “Monolith Series”). A much more elaborate materialisation of the same technique can be seen in his work for the logistics hub Le Freeport in Niederanven, Luxembourg (2014) or the headquarters of GS1 Portugal, in Lisbon (2016). Developed in partnership with Promontório Architects, the practice responsible for redesigning the existing building, the latter project consisted in creating 49 precast concrete panels for its new zigzag façade, alternated with floor-to-ceiling glass panes. The work proposes a reflection on the chaos of information and visual noise while questioning its disruptive role, which in turn is counterpoised by the presence of several human figures. All together, the panels form a large-scale composition devised to interact with the sunlight, producing different nuances according to the time of day and the season.

This conceptual approach to cause and effect is made shockingly evident in his art video series based on the use of explosives which developed as a radical complement to his wall-carving technique. First presented in 2011 with the “Detritos Series” (shot in late 2010), the concept developed as a reaction to the effects of the global financial crisis that started shaking the world in 2008. The series of three videos constitutes a powerful metaphor on the current system’s volatile nature and its explosive effects on social reality. The slow-motion footage (shot with a high-speed digital camera) would also mark the artist’s first major venture into the world of film directing, a field which has seen him in the intervening years shoot music videos for names such as Portuguese bands and musicians Orelha Negra (“M.I.R.I.A.M.”, 2011), Buraka Som Sistema (“Stoopid”, 2014), and Carlão (“A Minha Cena”, 2015), as well as Irish rock giants U2 (“Raised by Wolves”, 2014).

The title of the “Detritos Series” (detritus, in English) plays not only with the idea of rubble and ruin but also with the notion of waste – a pivotal concept for Vhils, who makes extensive use of discarded materials, part of the refuse the city generates during its cycles of destruction and creation in its ever-ambitious expansion, which are given a new lease of life when recontextualised in the space of the gallery. Despite only lasting a second or two, the video recording enables the viewer to witness the complexity of the explosions in slow motion. Yet, however powerful the resulting wall piece may be, the artistic statement contained in both this and the subsequent series engaging with the same technique (such as the “Pulsão Series”, 2014, or “Hint Series”, 2016), lies in the process itself: the controlled explosion and what it represents. Following the concept of creative destruction, these explosions contain two distinctive moments of expression: one representing a stage of violence and destruction, closely followed by another of creation and birth.

The symbolic significance of this volatility, the explosions and ensuing debris is also contained in the way the globalised model of development operates with regard to construction. As Vhils’ work began expanding to other corners of the world, he came to realise how the urban transformations he had witnessed during his childhood in Portugal were part of a wider, transnational trend which sees undifferentiated, functionalist architecture and similar urban planning schemes being implemented in diverse locations, imprinting a homogenised environment which is blind to local characteristics and cultures.

Equally important in this context are the artist’s projects with communities facing critical issues detrimental to their well-being, developed in locations such as Portugal (Bairro de Santa Filomena, 2007; Rabo de Peixe, 2013 and 2015; Bairro 6 de Maio 2017-18), China (Shanghai, 2012), Brazil (Morro da Providência, 2012; Ladeira dos Tabajaras, 2013; Aldeia de Araçaí, 2014), or Cape Verde (Bairro da Achada Grande Frente, 2019). Whether addressing subjects such as property speculation, urban renewal and gentrification schemes with recourse to forced evictions and involuntary settlements, or simply ostracised communities, most of these projects have sought to address the devastating consequences of following a single market-driven approach to development and redevelopment, one that often leaves such communities behind in the name of modernisation. These projects involve spending time in the community, getting to know the people who live there, sharing experiences with them, listening to their stories and concerns, photographing them in their environment and then carving their portraits in a place they have a particular connection with in a bid to help make their plights visible to the world at large.

Seeking to establish a dialogue between disparate realities, Vhils has also adopted a practice of transference applied to both source materials and the subject matter he works with. This sees him presenting work in one country with recourse to materials sourced in others, highlighting the uniformity contained in this fixed element and how it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between the material reality of one city and that of another. This cultural exchange also encompasses visual and graphic patterns displayed by advertising, and other decorative elements. On another level, it also includes people, moved from their original local contexts to new destinations, with each specific dissection transcending the particularities of its immediate reality and becoming instead part of a broader global reflection. This conceptual migration of people establishes a correlation between human identities that imprints a continuity between various series and bodies of work.

In this spirit of dialogue and exposure, some of his community-related projects have also been extended to the gallery setting. The 2012 project in the old communal neighbourhoods of Shanghai that were being torn down and replaced with new high-rise buildings were part of the focus of the “Visceral” solo show held at Danysz gallery. The reflection developed in the community of Ladeira dos Tabajaras in Rio de Janeiro (2013), which was equally undergoing a brutal process of expropriation, was also extended to the “Fragmentos” solo exhibition at the Clark Art Center in the same city. The project with the indigenous village of Araçaí, in Brazil (2014) – home to a community of 90 Guarani people forced off their ancestral lands in 2000 by a government relocation programme – was also the focus of three solo exhibitions (in Curitiba, 2014; Recife, 2015; and Brasilia, 2019) where Vhils explored the contrasts between the community’s near-isolation and impoverished living conditions and the bountiful modernity of the country’s cities. Working together with the community’s artisans, blending new carving techniques with ancient traditions, the latter project resulted in a poignant installation entirely composed of hand-carved wooden doors that speaks of the devastating clash between modern development and traditional ways of life.

Vhils’ work with Portuguese social researcher and activist António Brito Guterres in the 6 de Maio community in Amadora, Portugal (2017-18), which was targeted for demolition – with many of its long-time inhabitants falling between the bureaucratic cracks of the resettlement programme –, culminated in the transfer of a large section of one of the demolished façades to the National Museum of Ancient Art, in Lisbon, in the scope of a group show exploring the practice of portraiture in Portuguese art. Carved with the portraits of three inhabitants of the old community – each representing a different generation –, the piece sought to share with the viewers of this institutional setting something of the affections and narratives of an invisible periphery marked for extinction but whose memories, resistance and lives are deeply embedded in the wider city’s fabric.

All of these elements and reflections have been an integral part of Vhils’ recent solo exhibitions in major institutions, including those curated by the EDP Foundation in Lisbon (“Dissection”, 2014), by the Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation in Hong Kong (“Debris – Hong Kong”, 2016), by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macau S.A.R. Government (“Debris – Macau”, 2017), or by Le Centquatre-Paris in the French capital (“Fragments urbains”, 2018).

In all four of these shows, the exhibition space was purposefully built or redesigned as a neutral setting conducive to reflection, with the objective of enabling the viewer to experience a transition and release from the urban chaos that lay outside. Yet, far from wanting to establish a rigid distinction between the city (outdoors) and the gallery (indoors), Vhils uses them as complementary settings, establishing material and conceptual links between them. If in these four exhibitions (as well as in Vhils’ other solo shows) most indoor pieces were intentionally displayed with clarity and free of interferences, the murals created outdoors (also part of the exhibitions) played directly with the city’s visual noise.

If the artworks displayed in these exhibitions were clearly presented as stills – static fragments that have been captured, removed from their original context and reworked by the artist – a series of video installations acted as a further symbolic decompression chamber, displaying footage captured in the city itself. Intending to share with the viewer something of the essence and the present reality of these urban contexts, these videos were shot with an ultra high-speed digital camera that enabled Vhils to capture images at a very low speed, creating the sharp-detailed slow-motion intensity seen in them. By slowing down the pace, these works set the tempo for the exhibitions, enabling viewers to be drawn into the poetics of the city often overlooked in the fast-paced rhythm set by the modern urban experience, allowing them to refocus and appreciate the mundane moments of beauty removed from the dissonance that usually envelops and distracts them in the city.

In sharp contrast, in the first three exhibitions of this list, acting almost like a connecting interface between the two settings, key installations played with the very chaos and dissonance of the city and threw it back at the viewer: the “Neutrões Series” (in Lisbon, 2014) and “Flicker Series” (in Hong Kong, 2016, and Macau, 2017). Displayed in dark rooms, these installations with television sets covered with perforated acrylic sheets that acted like stencils over the moving images created an immersive kaleidoscopic experience of sound and fury, conveying the relentless bombardment of mass culture on the life and identity of the individual.

The soundscapes for these installations were all scored by Portuguese-Cape Verdean musician and social activist Nuno Santos, who goes under the name of Chullage, with whom Vhils has been collaborating since joining the latter’s Khapaz cultural association – based in the community of Arrentela, in Seixal – in 2004. This longtime partnership also saw Chullage compose part of the musical arrangement, as well as deliver a powerful spoken word performance, for Vhils’ first stage production, entitled “Periférico”. Created in the scope of the 2017 edition of BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts, and presented at Lisbon’s Belém Cultural Centre in April of that year, the production explored the convergence between various artistic territories, creating a synergy between the arts (street art and stage art), music (contemporary and popular), and dance (street and classical), delivering a dynamic encounter between worlds that are often exclusionary. The reflection it contained explored some of the themes Vhils has been exploring recurrently in his oeuvre: mass urbanisation, peripheral communities, the emergence of urban subcultures and urban creativity and the impact of these on Portugal’s social and cultural reality since the 1974 revolution.

Also playing with light and nuance were the installations with neons (“Gleam Series”, 2016-17) which Vhils first explored in the “Debris” series of exhibitions held in Hong Kong and Macau. While seeking to highlight the cultural importance of this dying art form in these locations, the artist took the standard technique and gave it a new approach, varying the thickness of the tubes in order to create greater detail. This operation of transposition and recontextualisation also sought to express the interplay of traditional and contemporary elements in today’s culture of appropriation and reinterpretation.

This interest in the symbolic value of light and shade has been materialised by Vhils in recent years in other works, such as the “Víscera” installation presented at Le Centquatre-Paris in 2018 and the “Glimmer Project #02” installation presented at Festival Iminente, in Lisbon, in the same year. Both consisted of carved plasterboard pieces fitted over a series of light bulbs. The cracks in the plasterboard walls that enabled the portraits to come to life expressed a gesture of rebellion seeking to counteract the city’s clean, functional austerity, reminding us how the human element – with its lively, intricate nature – is often disregarded in the construction of our cities, stifling our fundamental need for expression and emotional well-being, integral parts of our identity.

A similar idea was explored in the “Overexposure” installation series, first presented in the 2019 edition of Festival Iminente, in Lisbon. Formed by an arrangement of T8 tubular light bulbs suspended from the ceiling, its three-dimensional structure plays with the visual perception of the viewer, giving shape to an image that can only be fully viewed and understood from a certain point of view in space – a concept that had already been employed by Vhils in the 2015 “Perspective” installation presented at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, USA. While the latter acted as a metaphor for the multiple interpretations surrounding the concept of freedom (displaying the word Freedom composed from hundreds of white sheets of paper suspended from the ceiling, which could only be read from a particular viewpoint), the deconstructed image of the “Overexposure” installations seeks to create a visual impression on the viewer’s retina – a lasting imprint that dazzles and stimulates. Playing with the concepts of overexposure and technological overstimulation, this installation addresses the issue of how normal it is in our spectacle- and image-based societies to become desensitised to the use of visual representations, especially when repeated ad nauseam, culminating in the loss of the ability to make a critical assessment of these same images that shape and influence us.

Having started this ongoing dialogue with the urban space and its citizens twenty years ago, when he first became involved with illegal graffiti, Vhils has been steadily developing his reflection on the fertile complexity of contemporary urban societies into a significant statement on the present-day human condition. Materialised over a vast, rich and varied body of works that manifests his interest in breaking boundaries and help broaden our understanding of art’s relevance and function in the world of today, Vhils’ oeuvre speaks of human identity, of the challenges brought about by the fast-paced transformations and growing homogenisation that lie at the heart of the current model of global development, of effacement but also of resistance – in short, of what can be seen as a fundamental human essence which seems to have been left behind in this entropic journey of ours, helping make visible the things that lie invisible, in both material and immaterial terms.

The term “street artist” was there for the taking. It was not a new term – having been used pretty widely in the “internal community” since the ’80s — but it really seemed to catch on post Y2K as more and more artists took the principles of graffiti and ran with them.

I, myself, grew up as a graffiti writer. I never thought about the term until the late ’90s. Everything was just sort of graffiti or some sort of vandalism to me. However, around the new millennium art dealers, art collectors, and marketing directors began to see the potential in exploring works that had inherent narratives built in. Just like with the more traditional graffiti vandal, these street artists were out there often under the cover of night doing their thing.

Supposedly, the guy or girl who wrote graffiti was driven by this adolescent desire to see their name in as many places as possible, big and bold. But the “street artist” was someone who was taking the principles of graffiti — utilizing the street as a canvas — and packaging it in a way that felt — in many people’s eyes — more important than the movement from which it sprung. Although this wasn’t how its core members viewed it, once the press got a hold of things, the “street artist” label was hard to shake.

In the mid ’90s there were graffiti jams all over Europe. In the US, similar events took place and were largely dedicated to graffiti artists and hip-hop. By the mid 2000s — with the rise of the street art terminology — these events started to morph into street art festivals. In the last five years, dedicated mural festivals started — adding to the already confusing classification system.  Suddenly, artists from all over the world were lumped together. Some were hardcore graffiti writers, others were street artists, and some were just artists there to paint something really fucking big. As you can imagine, this mixture of experiences and styles further muddled the idea of what was, and was not, graffiti. 

No matter the classification, it was and still is definitely a good thing that so much public art was happening. And with more cooks in the kitchen than ever before, it brought out people’s competitive spirit. The same drive that kids had on the street doing illegal works was now being brought to these walls. The big question became, how do you stand out, and how can you make people notice when there’s so much art on the streets?

 

Enter Vhils.

 

Make no mistake, Vhils started as a graffiti writer. But as a street artist, he was able to put Lisbon/Portugal on the map. I’ve come to understand over the 25+ years I’ve been involved with graffiti that artists always want to push the boundaries on what’s possible. It’s my belief that Vhils didn’t wake up one day and say to himself, “I want to be a street artist.” I think it was really more, “how can I keep pushing myself to be better?”

I believe that Vhils channeled his frustrations — most assuredly a result of the walls being buffed, other writers going over his work, and the social climate of the world — into what has become an unmistakable visual language which involves chiseling into a structure. Whereas spray paint has a finite shelf life on the streets, Vhils' etchings live and age as the building or structure does. I liken it to a scar on the human body; it can’t be erased, and it comes with a good story.

People forgot Vhils ever did graffiti because his new works feel more personal and connected to things that interest him, like social causes, movements, and people who shaped him in different international cities. That’s not something he could portray with his graffiti — no matter how intricate his letter connections, how detailed his characters were, or the text that accompanied his name. The artistic drive — plus the vandal’s mentality — produced something really unique.

For me, Vhils became a graffiti artist who was using new mediums. Although he will probably always be labeled a street artist, Vhils is a student of graffiti and he was just taking what he was doing and finding how he could push it further. It evokes the same spirit of what Revs, Cost, and Freedom were doing decades earlier in New York City when they pushed themselves and changed the city.

In my opinion, the best street artists are the ones who never intended to become street artists in the first place. They just had one goal — to get up and do MORE.

I particularly like how Vhils has continued his expression in the gallery setting. I’ve seen people attempt to scale their pieces down so they fit within the parameters of a museum or gallery space. The magic is usually gone under those circumstances. But with Vhils, he finds a way of making his work feel like it’s been there a decade before the show took place, and will probably be there a decade later when the building gets demolished. That’s timelessness. 

Images and messages are both direct and subtle at the same time. They are direct, because the universal recognition of the visual elements is, as we have seen, an essential condition for their selection and construction; they are subtle, because in these images there is both a poetic delicacy and a political trap in the subliminal evocation they make of the harsh daily life of the cities. Throughout Vhils’ entire oeuvre, there is a demand for justice from those who look at (without seeing) the excluded that inhabit the cities and that the artist calls upon in his work; there is an effort to humanise what has been dehumanised, to exalt what has been abandoned, what has been (or will be) destroyed – all of this constitutes the raison d’être of his creative impulse.

His faces are always real portraits, even if they are, deliberately, figures picked from the anonymous crowd. They are mostly faces captured in the specific contexts where each major project takes place (run-down neighbourhoods threatened by erasure or eviction), or else adapted to the communication needs of these contexts. Relating to the sociological and urban situations of the contexts where they are exhibited, they are at the same time credible testimonies of real everyday life as well as standard faces, facial composite pictures of a global humanity, and the issues that block its redemption.

In monumental murals, displayed on noble façades, on the run-down walls of cities, or in the disused and abandoned factory zones where he intervenes, Vhils shows (transforming them into protagonists) those who remain invisible or those who are hidden by the violent machine of progress, transforming anonymous beings, lost in the crowd, into icons.

It is not a matter of transforming these ordinary beings into heroic exceptions: by concentrating the weight, the density, and the depth that inhabit a particular model in each of the faces that are exposed to our gaze, the images cease to be simple stereotyped abstractions and start to represent a collective being, a whole humanity that challenges us. This is one of the secrets of the energy that inhabits these images and of the success of the communication they carry. It is this solution – particular or local, common or universal, individual and collective – that defines the humanism underlying Vhils’ entire oeuvre.

Like this humanity at risk (and banished from history), the discourse that sustains Vhils’ work is placed on the margin (rather, it is set aside) of the hierarchy of visual discourses that are guaranteed a place in the exhibitions and collections of an art centre or museum of contemporary art, or in the centralised vision of those who write the artistic balance sheets of our time. On one hand, there is an urgency in Vhils’ démarche that leads him to seek the densification and subjectivising of the mesh of meanings of his works in the strategies of a fast and effective mass communication – born on the language of advertising and political posters, his practice, although it carries in itself multiple and rich questions, remains far from the technical and conceptual speculations of modern and post-modern artistic practice. On the other hand, Vhils remains permanently close to his origins as a street artist, abandoning neither the hip-hop culture that formed him, nor the places where he grew up as an artist, nor the original practices of direct urban intervention, nor the protagonists that accompanied his birth and those that succeeded him.

To what extent and why does the work of certain artists interest a vast public (even those who should feel alien to the realities that these artists represent or even feel guilty about what they are given to see)? It is a question that should be asked and that justifies thinking that there is a taste – transversal to the social universe – determined by a common majority culture and beyond class. In some cases, that engagement results from mere cynicism and anticipation of the profitability of the works acquired; in others, it results from immediate understanding or identifying with the proposed visual and thematic message regardless of their economic impossibility to acquire his works.

Vhils’ success is a result of this paradox, as well as of the fact that this transversal and profound reality, which covers numerous social, age and cultural groups, neither penetrates nor moves the establishment. The art world defends its vanguard minority territory, and still does not consider the expressions born from street art as its own. Unless a chance event (unregulated by any sociological law) leads them to be unexpectedly accepted, their expressions are destined to a mere sociological and anthropological understanding, considered as belonging to the domain of social appeasement and urban regeneration policies.

However, enhanced by the sense of an (apparently) clear message and the seductiveness of its technical qualities, each work by Vhils can be transformed into a collective moment of popular adherence that is urgent to learn to cross with other levels of discourse. The desirable breaking of these barriers does not mean the dilution of the specificities of phenomena that integrate the same historical time but not the same space of the sociological and aesthetic universe: they are coetaneous in time and overlap in space; they cross but do not get mixed up and do not depend on each other, they have different logics and deserve to be understood in their diversities.

It is not the legitimacy of Vhils’ oeuvre in the concert of contemporary art that is in question. What is urgent to understand is the specific place where it anchors and from which, aesthetically and socially, it is disseminated, gains meaning and becomes significant, marking a place in the critical and academic discourse of art history and not only in the sociology and cultural studies that accompany the reality and cultural context that frames it and of which it is a major protagonist.

 

The first world of Alexandre Farto

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils was born in Lisbon in 1987 and grew up in Seixal, once a small town with simultaneous rural and fishing roots located on the South Bank of the Tagus. The focus of accelerated industrialisation after the liberalising opening of the Marcelo Caetano government in the late 1960s, Seixal, now a city, played a key role in the political and social life of the so-called “red belt” of Lisbon, both before and after April 1974.

During his formative years, the young Alexandre Farto received from his father, a militant during the years of revolutionary unrest, a set of memories and values that would make him, by association and early artistic intuition, understand and transcend the visual and social context that surrounded him. Vhils grew up among walls covered in paintings and posters – images that responded, contradicted or reaffirmed themselves –, among images that – being stuck, scratched, or painted on long walls eroded by time – accumulated, degraded or were renewed; he lived surrounded by a working class that was withering in the face of the growing deindustrialisation of the area (of the country and of Europe) and in a society progressively taken over by unemployment; he belonged to a youth with no clear prospects and threatened by marginalisation and delinquency.

The ways out of this situation found by the youth located in the urban peripheries and in disadvantaged contexts in the 1980s and following decades are enriched by the diverse contributions (musical, lexical, clothing and behavioural) of the communities coming from the former Portuguese colonies, by how they blended with local realities, how they incorporated the contributions brought from African-American and British cultures and how they transformed the starting data, thus developing autonomous lines of creation.

Vhils’ work cannot be understood in isolation, as the individual manifestation of an uprooted genius: on the one hand, as we have seen, his presence is the fruit of the environment provided by his closest milieu (family and school); on the other, by his immersion and active participation in the cultural environment described above – it is there that he becomes a creator and not just a follower; it is there that he acquires a leading and promoting role, the acme of a current that his work and initiatives extended to many complementary areas of activity feed.

Since his early teens, Vhils’ action has been part of that vast movement that is conventionally known as urban culture, which is particularly alive on the South Bank of the Tagus. The collective manifestations of this culture, many of them born and developed in contexts of illegality, were, as mentioned, realities belatedly understood either by the political power interested in containing the damage of social contestation (and its marginal cultural manifestations) or by the institutionalised cultural power. We already know that this power is also centralising, conservative and elitist, dominated by modern and post-modern discourses, denying aesthetic autonomy to the creative manifestations of these peripheries, relegating them to fields of mere sociological and anthropological understanding and placing them, in general, dependent on the successes obtained by the musical side, as always sooner emancipated from its origins thanks to the economic impulse provided by the mass consumption generated in concerts, in releases and in the dissemination by social networks.

In terms of visual production, these phenomena were, however, understood fairly early on by the municipal powers, through the policies of social integration and tourist promotion strategies, designed either to annul economic, racial, and generational tensions or to create wealth and economic attractiveness. But for a long time they remained marginal to the (continuously dirigiste) cultural policy of the state. From that awareness of the appeasing utility of integrating the margins into the official discourse (or of the penetration of the official discourse into the contesting margins…), its protagonists began to integrate specific projects for the improvement of certain new or degraded urban areas that were in the process of being renovated. At the same time, their works and projects were acquiring significant economic dimensions, being articulated in urban art national and international networks, festivals and galleries, integrating such projects of social enhancement and also of tourist promotion of the cities or of certain private entities of increasingly greater economic power, giving the most prominent names a progressively greater commercial significance and a risk of institutionalisation. This widening of the intervention spectrum of the protagonists and their works was due to, and simultaneously caused, a widening of the audiences reached, of the intervention methods (with the creation and conquest of a market and a dense network of clients), of the topics and techniques developed; but it still did not correspond, as mentioned, to the conquering of a corresponding place in the established critical or museological discourse.

Vhils’ career was marked by the same succession of stages and the same type of blockages. He is the cliché of the young rebel, only integrated into school discipline through projects of an artistic nature, of the young man clandestinely painting train carriages and urban walls, of the young man who was discovered precociously (at the age of 18) by the sensitivity of a Lisbon gallerist (Vera Cortês), of the young man who, while studying abroad at one of the best art schools (University of the Arts London – Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), abandoned it out of a clear lack of interest in Academia and out of an urgent need for direct intervention in real daily life.

Vhils’ faces

The initial themes of his career are those of contesting the authority of the state and its agents, with reference, for example, to urban riots and police charges; but also, from early on, Vhils applied his attention to recovering and intervening on the accumulated memories of advertising and political posters that invaded the streets of his city.

Showing a depth of interests not always common to street art practitioners, from an early age Vhils began to work (from the point of view of form and matter, but also from the point of view of programme and themes) the overlaid layers of the social and historical time that surrounded him. In terms of handling urban posters, the recent past of contemporary art has fertile and vast material that Vhils took advantage of and developed: from the practice of French décollage in the 1960s and following decades to Ana Hatherly’s national intervention in the 1970s. Using this material correctly implies dealing with long time; but the vertiginous succession of commercial or political messages expressed in the public space, the degradation of the papers (by crumbling, tearing, loss of colour, detachment, and wrinkling) quickly makes the testimonies of that same long time obsolete. The application on these random layers (collected in the street or, later on, assembled in the studio) of his key motifs and of his fundamental techniques (the faces and some geometric patterns, the carving of the surfaces with blades) are here articulated with painting and guarantee the connection to his other works, especially to his carved interventions on the walls of urban or industrial sites.

Today, the strongest image in the artist’s oeuvre are the human faces which, as we know, he has defined as his central theme and for the representation of which he has found recurring modes of formal treatment. Such faces are created by Vhils through a sharp graphic approach defined by contiguous and fragmentary zones of shadow and light, separated or not by contour lines. This solution is dominant both in the large urban wall compositions and in the works already mentioned on paper through cuts and cut-outs through the dense layers of the recovered posters. Sometimes, in situations allowed by screen printing techniques, this obligatory simplicity is made more complex by the interposition or overlapping of images from different sources – but the authorial identification mark remains.

A central question, posed to all of Alexandre Farto’s works, is the question of the human and organisational machine that sustains the gigantism of his production. To guarantee the level of commissions (in terms of number, international dispersion, size and technical demands), the very functioning of Vhils’ studio reproduces a veritable social structure with varied hierarchies and functions – it is a challenge to manage this structure while maintaining a balance of interests, authorship, and camaraderie. Like many studios of some of today’s most active and outstanding artists, Vhils’ studio, located in vast hangars recovered from the old industrial park of Barreiro, on the South Bank of the river Tagus, does not fall short of the studios of the great ceramists or sculptors of antiquity, the medieval building sites or the workshops of certain great Renaissance and Baroque artists. For example, in Prisma [Prism], the installation showcased here, there were over fifty participants involved, including direct and permanent assistants and hired staff. As in the workshops of his historical predecessors, the authorship of the works is never called into question. But nowadays it is important to note the positive contribution of some of the collective discussions taking place within the studio (with technicians, architects, designers, and curators) and externally (with urban authorities or private commissioners, for instance) to the evolution of the artworks; not forgetting the symbolic (of the country’s cultural image) and economic significance that such a vast mobilisation of labour implies.

 

The cities’ skin

The faces, expanded to the monumental dimensions of the urban and industrial walls or managed in the smaller dimensions of the gallery works, globally maintain the correct monumental scale that guarantees the echo of the message that, as we have seen, Vhils intends to convey. But it was the actual invention and development of a work technique by carving or drilling urban walls, used in the majority of his public works, that made him popular.

The artist selects his images from a database collected in loco (in the case of the faces) or readapted to each circumstance. He composes the final image through a process of collage/montage and then projects it onto the chosen surface, creating the final images through a controlled technique of carving, digging and scraping the surfaces. Each of the elements of the puzzle of forms from which the overall image is built, thus appears as a piece of living flesh, revealed under a skin that has been torn off: through the memory of the construction’s inert body, the memory of the time accumulated in that wall (in its layers of plaster and colour), reveals the history of the very urban life it is part of. This is an intrusive but controlled archaeological practice, a dissection by sampling that reveals successive layers of matter and time. This same idea had already been made explicit by Vhils, as a technical, thematic, and conceptual programme, in the title of the anthological exhibition he held in 2014 (“Dissection”), at the EDP Foundation – Electricity Museum, in Lisbon.

But the first works he produced, after the illegal graffiti applied on city walls and suburban trains, were works whose materiality allowed them to be presented in a gallery context and acquired for individual collections. Those included metal boxes he used to intervene using nitric acid with images of urban struggles (protest groups and police charges, for example) – a logic of direct political denunciation which he later abandoned. And it was those urban posters (political and commercial), removed from their places of origin, where they were accumulated by overlapping, taking advantage of or creating detachments and rips in them, but also painting, on those random bases, images from the base vocabulary developed in the meantime – the anonymous faces of the crowd. For these same uncertain and rough surfaces, Vhils then developed the aforementioned methods of cutting and drilling, revealing the overlapping layers, and experimented with enveloping them in translucent and preservative resins that gave them the status of sculptural objects of true stelae. By burning and pickling he also applied the same type of images to old doors and window shutters of demolished buildings. Finally, in the multiples and editions he produces, he repeats these figurative solutions to which he quickly added (whether on urban façades or on posters or on wood) geometric solutions whose inspiration takes us back to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of the Portuguese patterned tile or the cobbled pavements. This is the image that runs through the various technical languages of his work and on which he has built his authorial mark.

Video is another structural axis of his work. From early on, Alexandre Farto began to use it as an autonomous means of work, although the intimate connection with his mural works makes the reading of those works more complex. The videos we are talking about, rather than documenting the carving and scarification of the walls or even complementing it, are artworks in themselves, created simultaneously with the material images they capture. Let us see how: a seemingly intact wall is filmed in a static shot for a few seconds; suddenly a series of small explosions fill the screen space with sounds, dust, and stones flying in all directions. When the dust, which sometimes totally obliterates our field of vision, disperses, an image (a face, a sentence, a pattern…) appears before our eyes, inscribed on the originally pristine wall. Sometimes, new explosions follow and the building where this new image had been created is demolished and everything disappears with it in seconds. The total ruin of the site is the ideal metaphor for a dystopia of destruction applied to the world around us.

The preparation of the film lasts much longer than the ephemeral seconds of the projection we have described: a production team made up of several specialists placed small charges distributed in such a way as to form the desired image and restored the wall to an illusory original state waiting to be activated. The final result is only apparently similar to the images produced by direct carving: the fact that they result from the explosion of the surfaces, caused by forces coming from within the plasters and the fact that their existence is, at the same time, local and irreproducible (the wall) and global and reproducible (the video copies), gives them a perfectly autonomous value as a work and as a language, speaking to us of a skin that bursts from an inner force, coming from the body, and not of a scarified or tattooed skin from an external action.

The same type of autonomy was seen in an installation presented in the aforementioned 2014 exhibition: a tunnel with videos (from the series entitled “Neutrões” [“Neutrons”]) where we felt surrounded by images and sounds specially designed for the effect (with musical composition and sounds studied by Nuno Santos, also known as Chullage). It comprised about 40 screens of various sizes arranged on either side of the darkened corridor, to which Vhils overlaid figurative stencils cut out of vinyl that muffled (and sometimes annulled) the moving images inscribed on those same screens, but which also intended to merge the different discourses there mobilised into one.

In the exhibition now being shown, the use of video, as we shall see below, has taken on a new dimension and achieved a very different status.

 

The global city 

Nine cities, three continents, countless hours of footage condensed into a handful of minutes of projection and sound. In the successive versions that followed the first screening until the one documented here (in Hong Kong, 2016; Macau, 2017; Paris, 2018; Cincinnati, 2020; and Lisbon, 2021), this work proved a success; but in the current version, it has surpassed all previous marks and all expectations.

Since 2016 and until the pandemic threshold in early 2020, always using the same equipment and working methodologies (special ballistic film cameras – capable of breaking down each second into 2000 frames that, once projected, extend for 1’30’’ of image –, placed on a fixed support in cars moving at normal speed) and taking advantage of its passages through nine successive cities (Hong Kong, Macau, Beijing, Los Angeles, Paris, Shanghai, Lisbon, Mexico City, and Cincinnati), where he went to carry out some of his most recognisable projects – related to inscriptions of faces and patterns carved into façades or even within the scope of solo exhibitions – Alexandre Farto was recording times and ways of life, moments of a commonplace and repeated daily life in each urban context.

I would like to mention two exhibitions that I attended and from which we embarked on the adventure of this exhibition. In 2018, in the spaces of the cultural centre Le Centquatre-Paris, in the city’s 19th district, Vhils presented a version of the ensemble of these same urban shots. It was a sequence of flat projections, each of them simulating, by their size, the monumental nature of panoramic screens. The scale established between the projected image and the viewer already created a direct confrontation between the latter and the captured urban spaces, the surrounding architecture, and the passing cars and pedestrians. The viewer followed the slowed-down motion of the visual elements recorded in each “panorama” and joined them, changing his own speed of movement in the exhibition space without being aware of it.

At the Vera Cortês Gallery, in Lisbon, in 2021, these same cities were projected onto the four walls of a contained, interior space. The solution found was entirely different from the one already described. It was designed for the venue according to the logic of a carousel of images or of a continuous tape: the cities followed one another and were linked together in an infinite travelling, with the viewer being surrounded by this flux and not being able to free himself from it; as if he were trapped in a circular visual trap. And, although the slowness of the images would then enter into a strange contradiction with the vertigo we felt, we moved from one city to another without rest.

In maat’s large central space, the projections are now conducted on 15 large, curved screens (measuring between 6 and 21 metres long and 2.60 metres high) that accompany or respond to the curvature of the room. These screens create a kind of panoramic surface of multiple planes around the viewers, enveloping but also moving. The fact that, although they are loose architectural elements in space, they are visually linked to each other adds value to the already large initial dimension of each one, and the whole can be seen as cuts in a continuous space-time strip. These screens, distributed in the oval space of the room in a rhythmic but irregular way, are lined on the back by acrylic mirrors that reflect us and the projections of each other. By overlapping two of these screens over others that support them on the ground, Vhils creates the conditions for a true urban labyrinth. We are thus surrounded by a global city, which places us between the utopia of egalitarianism and the dystopia of uniformity. They are, in fact, urban landscapes – cityscapes, as the artist calls them – that offer us a breathless space, cities of closed perspectives, from which nature (with its vegetal and animal manifestations) seems to be absent, leaving us without natural retreat spots.

We all feel like prisoners in the Global City: the banality of the views in each one blurs with each other and forces us into a constant game of deciphering and identifying. The non-fictional, but documentary or evocative register of the simple surveillance camera records separates this project from aesthetic, self-referential, or art-historical justifications. This shuffling of references, this spatial confinement, but also the scheme that governs the proposed visual flow are essential elements in defining the viewer’s contradictory situation of subjection and constraint (or of euphoria and enchantment) – the slow rhythm of the images and the omnipresent ambient sound force us into a time of attention/observation that is uncomfortable and leads us to exasperation; or, in this whirl, we are taken by a kind of fascination and horizontal-vertical vertigo that leads us to a feeling where liberation and alienation blend together.

Vhils uses records obtained in a pre-pandemic time in the great metropolises of the globalised world – their slowness forces us to reflect on the eternising of each gesture, of each face we come across. In other words, the artist worked on these images in a still accelerated and vertiginous world that considered itself immune to any regression and to any brake. By subjecting the collected commonplace images to a brutal deceleration, Vhils anticipated the crisis we are now experiencing – and to the myth of modern, contemporary and post-modern speed, he counterposed an unusual metaphorical slowness that 2020 made real, although no name or ideology has yet been found to define it.

The anonymous inhabitant of the cities – as Gogol or Poe, Baudelaire, or Melville defined him in the 19th century, and to whom the 20th century accentuated the characteristics of isolation and massification, giving him new literary and cinematographic personalities –, is confronted, here and now, with his own impotence and despair. The body and the global destiny of global beings from all the cities in the world are immersed by Vhils in an atmosphere that is too dense for them to move around in a normal way; and the simplest events that they protagonise (crossing a street, walking on a pavement, meeting someone, looking at a building façade…) develop at the dragging pace imposed on them, as if they turn the whole action into an impossible conclusion. The slowness that these works present does not lead us to a platform of rest; and the deceleration that they force us to does not lead us to a haven of peace.

The truth is that we ourselves – no matter the time or the speed, no matter our status or the name of the city we live in – become prisoners of the same trap that holds all the extras in these vast urban frescoes conceived by Vhils. His actions, marked by Zeno’s paradox, seem to be really prevented from concluding, or it is we, the viewers, who are prevented (no time) from watching their conclusion – everything is suspended in an in-between time that eternises itself as if we were in a small moment of death (before or after the time that we are really living).

Thus, Vhils appears to us as a guide, a universal flâneur of this new time of ours caught in the trap of the cities. Living in them between the utopia of the global city and its dystopia, the artist does not distance himself from its fascination, capturing its perpetual movement: he remains seduced by the charm of its sounds, colours, and speeds; conquered by the vertigo and excess of these cities that never sleep. But he remains also aware of its dangers: he tries to avoid them through the extreme slowness with which he returns the captured images, through the detail he puts into the now simultaneous representation of an immense theory of new common faces (and bodies). Vhils impersonates one of these characters and also makes us (by virtue of the space-sound staging) one of them (the exhibition benefits from being seen with the maximum number of simultaneous viewers in the spaces between and in front of the screens). Going beyond the destiny of a Gogol or a Baudelaire, of a Poe or a Melville who, although critically looking at the city and the crowd, are immersed in it, Vhils rather takes the melancholic distance of a Pessoa who, from the height of his window, gazes at the perspectives of his city and reflects on its inhabitants with melancholic slowness.

The hero of this video-fresco, of this post-realist mural, is its own author and us, anonymous heroes of this way of getting lost, circling endlessly (without any possible Ariadne or thread) in a kaleidoscope, in a prism, in a labyrinth that does not need to hide any monster because it is the monster itself that devours us. We can only dream of the moment when slowness and speed intersect, giving us back the just human time.

First of all I would like you to make an assessment of exhibiting for the first time in Spain (at least in a solo exhibition). It seems that you first had to go around the world to get to your neighbor first. 

I know, it seems a little ironic. Not only because our two countries are so close geographically, but also culturally. But for some reason, who knows, perhaps fate, my journey took me to other parts of the world first. I believe that sometimes things happen at the right time, and even though I have always wanted to present my work in Spain and develop an artistic narrative that mirrors our shared history, I think that doing it now, after so many other experiences, has made this incursion even more interesting and fruitful.    

What is it like for a graffiti artist who uses or has used cities as a canvas to exhibit in a gallery behind closed doors? At first it seems paradoxical.... How do your schemes and work philosophy change when you move from the street to the studio? 

Working in public space and within the context of a gallery are in fact two very different experiences, however my underlining conceptual approach is the same in both situations. You could say that my studio work is an attempt to bring urban realities, ideas and issues into a closed space, which presents very specific challenges, but also a great many opportunities. Presenting in a gallery gives me the chance to explore and experiment with new techniques, try out new ways of encapsulating my large-scale work into different kinds of pieces using various mediums, and this is a process I really enjoy. Additionally, and especially for someone who began by drawing inspiration from the streets and seeing their work incorporated into an urban landscape, presenting in a gallery allows for the work to be observed through a different perspective, isolated, focused, which opens it up different interpretations.

He presents in Spain (Seville) his exhibition Fractal, where he shows a wide range of pieces created from tile panels, one of the hallmarks of Portuguese architecture, heritage and urbanism. Is it a return to his origins? Does it have to do with a revision of his personal imaginary?

This is actually the first time I have worked with tiles, a medium I have long admired and wanted to explore. As you mention, tiles are in fact an integral part of Portuguese architecture and cultural identity. I have great admiration for masterful craftsmanship, especially when it is related to urban contexts. For example, in 2015 I worked with extremely talented “calceteiros” – pavers who are experts in producing the emblematic Portuguese “calçada” – to create a mural of Fado icon Amália Rodrigues. The impulse to work with tiles comes from the same place: a desire to understand, explore, reinterpret and pay homage to an artform that is close to my roots and cultural heritage.

Coincidentally, Seville is another city marked by the history of tiles and ceramics.

Precisely, and that is why I chose this exhibition to begin this exploration with tiles. The tile pieces in Fractal are an acknowledgement of how this medium is one of the elements that connects our two cultures, and of the influence of North-African Moorish culture across the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal traces its tile-making history to Spain, and specifically to the city of Seville, so this was a perfect opportunity to establish this correlation.

However, despite the geometric references of the tile, omnipresent in this exhibition, the human presence remains a constant in his work. Rather, the gaze of man, more scrutinizing than ever on this occasion, looks straight at the viewer.

The complexity of human existence in the context of urban environments and globalization has always been central to my work. And while this reality has many layers, people are always the main focus. Ideas surrounding things like social homogenization, gentrification and inequality ultimately have a profound effect on who we are and our personal and collective realities. The contemporary world lives on the edge of a permanent struggle between individuality/freedom and conformity/standardization, which is reflected in the faces and gazes of the subjects present in my work, which are almost always people from local communities. While these faces make us feel observed, my hope is that they also make us feel seen, and that we end up recognizing ourselves in them: mirrors of both our individuality and our oneness, which contrary to what many may think, are not mutually exclusive concepts.

There is also something archaic in 'Fractal', something archaeological, something halfway between the ancestral and the tremendously contemporary: some pieces, depending on how you look at them, seem at the same time historical (archaeological) findings or urban remains of a big city dump.

This idea of archaeology, of digging into the past and peeling back layers is deeply present in my work. The bas-relief carving technique I developed is based on this premise: to scratch into the various stratums of our urban existence and reveal what lies beneath, which in turn exposes who we are, and hints at where we are going. Similarly, my studio work also permeates these characteristics. I often think about what artefacts of our civilization would be found if for some reason our time on earth ended. What would be left, and what would that say about who we were and how we lived?

He started doing graffiti when he was 12 years old. Now urban art is very consolidated, understood and has even made the leap to art galleries and museums. What attracted you more, the artistic part or that sense of clandestinity and rebelliousness that was understood almost as a desecration of public spaces? What did you want to be / do / achieve in those beginnings?

In the beginning it was a form of expression. An outlet for my creative ideas and emotions. Artistic interventions in urban spaces can often seem impulsive and visceral, but there is always meaning. While some might see urban culture as inferior or as a lesser form of creativity, I believe this perspective is misinformed and perhaps even a little myopic. When we look back at the work of artists like Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring or Gordon Matta-Clark, to name just a few, we begin to understand that, while not immediately recognized by the art world establishment, their vision was actually avant-garde and ultimately an exteriorization of their experiences. So, I don’t think it is so much a question of what attracted me, but that this is my form of expression, which in turn cuts into realities that are intimately close to the urban fabric. Regarding the idea of rebelliousness, of course there is something to be said about the rush of breaking the rules, but isn’t all art, in one way or another, an act of defiance? As we move forward, I believe that more and more people will see urban art for what it really is: art, and therefore leave behind the need to put it in its own category. 

At what creative stage are you at?

At the moment I am beginning to give form to ideas and concepts that I began to develop during the pandemic. The last two years were extremely atypical and represented a particularly difficult time for us, as individuals and as a collective. As an artist, I can’t help looking at this event, and the countless effects it had, through a perspective of creation, because this is how I channel my ideas and how my work is formed. At the end of the month, I will be opening Prisma, a new solo show at MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, which relies solely on video footage gathered in various cities around the world, and I have a number of upcoming projects that are connected to the various challenges we are currently facing on a global scale. Additionally, I have become increasingly fascinated with the digital universe and the opportunities it presents in straightening the gap between artists and collectors, which has led to the release of Layers, which is a generative collection of unique digital works and will serve as a gateway into my world.

¿Algún espacio público especial en España / Sevilla en el que le gustaría intervenir?

 Spain is an extremely culturally-rich country, with so many different regions to explore, so it is hard to pinpoint a specific public space in which I would like to intervene. I would love to discover different peripheral communities of large urban centres like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville or Bilbao, and dive into their unique culture and the distinctive ways they have found to express their identity. Working with people and communities is what I most like to do because these exchanges are what create the most unique and valuable experiences, and inspire the best art. 

Some compare you to Banksy. Do all graffiti artists feel part of the same artistic family, of the same community?

I think that like most people who have a common history or a similar origin story, it is inevitable for there to be a sense of camaraderie and community among artists who have backgrounds in graffiti. There is also a feeling of mutual admiration because it is always interesting to see these roots reflected in different artists’ work, and how each one develops into a unique and original body of work. As for Banksy, his attitude and approach on how to use the public space effectively to communicate ideas and interact with a large audience was pivotal in shaping my own ideas and approach. I admire his work and what he’s accomplished, although I don’t claim any direct influence in terms of visual language or style.

All graffiti artists have a nickname. In this case, can we find any meaning for Vhils?

Vhils is simply a name I put together back in the days when I painted graffiti. It functions with the same logic as a pseudonym but it has no meaning whatsoever beyond the letters that form it. Like many other graffiti writers, I experimented with various names until I could come up with one that satisfied me. The basis of graffiti is calligraphic/typographic expression, the use of a name as a form of visual identity. The name Vhils contained some of the letters I most liked to write and draw grouped together in a sequence that enabled me to paint and write faster in illegal contexts. When I first started showcasing my work in galleries and other art- related contexts I was already known as Vhils, so I decided to keep it and use it alongside my real name.

 

Tell us about your upcoming show in LA.

I'm very excited, as this is my first solo show in LA, despite the fact that I've worked here before and have been coming here for years. Annihilation looks into many of the issues I've been exploring with my work in recent years, namely in connection with the present human condition in globalized urban societies. It will feature a new body of works created specifically for this show. It also marks the opening of the new OTI gallery in LA, so it's quite an honor to have been chosen for this.

What is the subject you are focusing on in these new artworks?

The concept of annihilation explored here is connected with the process of cultural homogenization brought about by the dominant model of development that's being implemented around the world. It concerns the impact it's having on local identities and the erosion of cultural uniqueness we're witnessing today but also the impact of mass consumption and material growth and the absurdity of following a model that is mathematically impossible to sustain, possibly even in the short term.

How do you decide on which subject you want to portray?

This depends on the nature of the project at hand. For this exhibition, as the subject revolves around the idea of dissecting various local urban realities from around the world in this new global era, both the subjects and the materials have been mostly sourced from various cities I've been working in over the last few years, including Los Angeles, Lisbon, Hong Kong, Paris, Rio de Janeiro or Beijing, among others. The idea is to both confront and establish a visual dialogue between these varied realities, exploring similarities and differences. This patchwork also mirrors the interplay between elements of different origins and cultures we can see at work in any large city today, expressing the increasingly homogenized environments we live in.

Are there any messages or causes you want to relay with your artworks?

The main themes present in my work are mostly connected with a reflection on the complex reality of the urban spaces most of us live in today and the globalized model of development we are following, how we are losing touch with our human nature by following a path that seems to be leading us to annihilation for the sake of profit and exploitation. Development and growth are good, but not only should they be based on our needs and not on our desires, they should also be inclusive and sustainable in the long run and oriented towards the well-being of the population. I'm greatly concerned with the sustainability of the world if we keep following the current model of development – both in terms of resources and the environment. If we leave everything for the market forces to solve, we are doomed. Abstract entities will never come up with a sustainable solution for the only world we have to live in. This is a major issue for my generation and the ones to come. A comprehensive, rational and practical discussion and organization is needed globally to tackle the issues the world will face in the next few decades. I see my work as being deeply connected with this discussion and these issues. I also look into the notions of identity and how people and the places they live in are locked in a cycle of reciprocal shaping through which they develop a shared character. I further explore the themes of randomness and the ephemeral nature of things, both of which are deeply connected with what I do and how I do it.

Is there a new material you are experimenting with? Or a technique you have never done before prior to this show?

The show includes some pieces that expand some of the techniques and mediums I've been using, such as the new series of carved wooden doors with inlaid wooden overlays, and a series of massive pieces with hand-carved advertising posters removed from the streets, among others. It will also include two new concrete cast sculptures that are conceptually linked with the styrofoam pieces of the Diorama Series I've been exploring since 2012.

What’s it like seeing your work inside a gallery versus a public space? Describe the process.

I think that working in the streets and working in a gallery can be complementary, although the fact that you are creating in different settings demands a different type of approach. When you work in the public space you are competing with the visual clutter already present in the city and therefore you must work hard to create an impact on people who, at least in theory, will be more indifferent or busy when confronted with the work. The street is also a more unrestricted environment, where you can basically do what you want, but you have less time to work on a piece. Gallery work serves another purpose. You can create more detailed work, as you have more time to produce it and people will have more time to see it. People will also come with a different attitude and approach to it. You can establish a closer rapport with them, focus more on what you're trying to express and the subjects you're trying to convey. Overall I make no distinction between them, regarding both simply as art. I adjust the work to each specific setting, but for me there is always a connection between these two environments.

What are your thoughts on artists being too invasive over public artworks?

What are your thoughts on the current state of street art? Graffiti?

Art in urban contexts seems to be booming nowadays. This has both positive and negative aspects to it: one the one hand you have lots of talented artists out there interacting with their cities and creating fantastic artwork; on the other the growing popularity inevitably attracts those who seek to profit from it. In some cases it seems to be viewed as the new goose that lays the golden eggs. The present urban art scene seems to be split along the legal and illegal seams, and in both contexts people are creating very interesting work. Illegal art will always be rough and vibrant, while in recent years we have seen a huge increase in the number of large-scale mural works being produced in cities around the world, and the majority of these are legal, commissioned works that can be viewed as a new form of public art. This reflects an increasing awareness, acceptance and desire for these works. In this respect, urban art projects can contribute directly to help renovate neglected areas of a city, embellishing them, but this in turn can also create new interest for outsiders who are mobilised to come and see the new art. This interest can help draw attention to the communities, it can generate a new respect and acknowledgement for these areas and their communities, and it can bring tourists and foster the local economy. Graffiti is a different kettle of fish. Its energy comes from the fact that it's illegal. It's done by writers for writers. And that's how it should remain. Illegal, rough and raw.

What projects are you currently working on?

I'm working on a variety of projects which I will divulge in due time. For now I can share that I'm working on a new big museum solo show in Paris, that will open later in May.

How long do you see yourself creating artworks? Do you have an ultimate end goal?

I've never given it much thought. Who knows? I'd like to keep on working for as long as I'm able...

Why did you shift from graffiti and start using carving and other methods in your work?

As I explained above, I never replaced one practice with the other. I still write graffiti, although not as often as I'd like to, but it's still part of who I am, and to all intents and purposes I see it as my first art school. It has given me lots of skills and it's very much present in my artwork today, even if not apparent. It's there in some of the concepts, the tools, techniques, etc. But it's important to understand that in spite of this my artwork is not graffiti. The shift, as you call it, coincided with my own maturation. When I was 17 or so, I began questioning what I was doing and what I wanted to do. I already understood the huge potential in using the public space to reach out to a vast number of people so I began exploring other tools and techniques, such as stencils, and creating more figurative work. I became interested in somehow merging art and the vandal aesthetics of graffiti, to contrast the beauty and poetics of the results with the destructive force of the means. During this phase of experimentation and research, one day it struck me that instead of painting yet another layer to these already thick-layered walls, I could peel them back and work directly with what the city had to offer. This subtractive technique, which I was to employ in most of my work from then on, came about from the convergence of reversing the stencil technique (in order to create by removing layers) while pursuing the concept of creative vandalism I had taken from graffiti.

You describe yourself as an urban archaeologist, can you elaborate on this? 

I don't really describe myself as an urban archaeologist, I say that that the process I employ is somewhat akin to a new form of urban archaeology, because it enables me to delve into the layers that form our material reality and bring to light some of the essence that has been buried beneath. I first began employing the subtractive technique I described above to cut through these thick agglomerations of posters I removed from the streets. As I did so, I began noticing that fragments of older posters were revealed. I immediately connected this with my observations of the old crumbling walls around Lisbon that seemed to be steeped in history, as if the passage of time added new layers and buried something of the past. Carving through these posters was like sifting through layers of the city's recent history. It made clear how chaotic life in the city really is, how fast things change with the current pace of development and technology. I began employing the same technique and concept to other mediums, like walls and most of the work developed organically from there. Since then, what I've been trying to achieve with my work is to help make visible these things that lie invisible (in both material and immaterial terms), exploring these layers that build up in the course of our everyday life in the city, to make us reflect on what we are trying to achieve.

How do you use your art to tell stories in and about urban spaces?

By helping make visible what is already there but not many can or are willing to see.

Where do you draw the line between art and street art and how do you straddle the two?

I've never really liked these distinctions. To me, art is art, regardless of the context in which it's produced or exhibited. I understand they can be useful in some cases, and different contexts obviously demand different approaches but I've always adjusted my work to the particularities of each specific setting, just like you do when using different media. Overall I see them as being complementary. In the public space you have to compete with all the visual clutter that is already there, so you seek to create simpler work that will create a bigger impact on people, whereas in the gallery you have the conditions to present more detailed work which people will have more time to see. Those are the main differences.

How did your collaboration with Hennessy come about? What did this collaboration entail?

I was invited by them to create a new limited-edition bottle, something which they have been doing over the years with various other artists. The collaboration entailed coming up with a new visual concept for their bottle, as well as a series of original artworks to go with the limited-edition. The collaboration is about paying homage to Hennessy's heritage and savoir faire by bringing to the present some of the brand's old imagery while looking towards the future. At the same time the project also involves an innovative series of mural installations in seven cities around the world, all of which will be created to pay homage to important local figures who are pushing the boundaries of their respective fields.

Why did you choose Yvonne Chaka Chaka for your SA portrait?

As this project will be travelling to various cities around the world, there was a lot of research involved on local people who represented the values we were looking to highlight. Like so much of my work, the idea is to help make visible what lies invisible beneath the surface. Yvonne Chaka Chaka is an extraordinary human being, an artist and also a humanitarian and activist. Adding to her music, she is a champion for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the founder of the Princess of Africa Foundation, which carries out community and social charity work. She is also a strong defender of women’s rights, a cause which she has channelled into her music. It was an honour and a privilege to meet her and to portray her through my art. This project is all about highlighting such wonderful individuals who have given so much to their communities and to the world. This is what I like doing through my art.

What is your creative process? How did you plan and execute this particular portrait?

I always start by photographing the subject, then rework the image digitally in order to simplify it and divide it into various colour-coded layers. These will allow me to convey depth and contrast once I'm working on the wall. I often also like to add some other elements like graphic or geometric patterns that create a connection with local visual languages. Once I'm on site, I usually start by painting directly on the wall a rough sketch of the composition I've created on the computer. Each layer I coded on the computer will be painted with a different colour, usually ranging from black to various shades of grey or browns. In this case I only used black and white, as the substratum already provided some colour that provided the right amount of contrast needed to bring the image to life. Once the sketch is concluded, the carving process is done with the aid of rotary hammer drills, in the main areas, while the more delicate areas are tapped out with the aid of hammer and chisel. The choice of technique always depends on the wall's consistency and characteristics. During the conception stage I always work alone, but the carving process requires the aid of some of my team members, as these large-scale pieces can take several days to complete. As this one was also high up on a building's façade we also had to use a cherry-picker.

2 - I asked you this question recently when we talked, but what mediums do you find yourself drawn to most these days? 

I'm still drawn to all the mediums I work with, as I like to keep pushing each to its limits, delving deep into its core and viscera. I've been very focused on the work I've been doing with concrete cast sculptures and I've included a few in this exhibition. These are derived from the styrofoam Diorama Series I've been working since 2012 but where this is a very delicate material, concrete has that brutalist nature that I really enjoy working with.

3 - How much time are you spending in Hong Kong these days compared to Lisbon, or even just being out on the road? 

I've definitely been spending more time in Lisbon this year, whenever I'm not on the road, but I still have a small studio in Hong Kong where some new projects are being hatched.

4 - Let's talk Annihilation. Why that name?

The title comes from the reflection I've been developing with my work in recent years on the impact which the dominant model of development and the new global culture it has given rise to are having on the different identities and cultures in the world. It concerns the tensions between local and global realities, the erosion of cultural uniqueness in face of this overwhelming process of globalization that has opened up a new Pandora's box, the consequences of which we all ignore. This is especially true with regard to the sustainability of this model that is been imposed on a world with limited resources. It seems to me that we're absurdly sacrificing both our own existence and that of other species and the planet for short-term material comfort. Annihilation is all about this destruction of our essence, our identities, our cultures.

5 - You have worked with Over the Influence in the past in HK, and now get to kick off their massive new space in Los Angeles. When you do a gallery show, especially in a 7,000 sq foot space, how do you prep this out? When did you start working on the show? 

Prepping for a show involves many stages, from coming up with the original concept to starting to conceive the type and number of pieces I want to work with, sketching and creating renders, and then getting my production team to get the ball rolling in terms of logistics, setting up a work calendar, spatial planning and design, sourcing materials, scouting locations for walls, etc. For this particular show, the process started roughly one year ago, even if all the while we're still working on other projects. The closer we get to the opening date, we tend to give priority to the show. This is my debut exhibition in LA and California, so I really wanted to get things right and make a good impression. Here I also have the added honor and responsibility of being the first artist to showcase work in the new Over the Influence gallery.

6 - You are finishing up a mural with Shepard at the moment. I feel like this is a nice return of favor from the wall he did in Lisbon... you have any other walls you will do in LA this week?

Yes, besides the wall I just finished with Shepard I'm working on two other walls which I'll reveal as soon as they're finished. Shepard is an amazing and unique artist who's been a huge influence. Being able to spend time and work with him first in Lisbon and now in LA has been both an enormous pleasure and a huge honor. I'm absolutely stoked with the work we've been able to do together. His dedication and devotion to the movement is unparalleled. His ideas and his activism are both inspiring and vital in the world we live in. He's been one of my main references ever since I began painting in the streets back in 1999. Besides this he's simply a great human being. I can't praise him enough.

7 - Again, we've talked about this before, but this ghostly quality to your work. There is something about your aesthetic of the "things we leave behind but never forgotten." You are really connected to this aesthetic. Can you perhaps tell us a little bit about why that connection exists? 

Perhaps it's because most of my work comes down to a search for a lost essence, something which can be symbolically retrieved from the depths of the material culture that shapes our identity in this day and age. I like to look at this new globalized urban paradigm we're following and try to reflect about this loss of identity, perhaps even a loss of soul. And the result, especially when carved on a wall in a derelict location, can be perceived as somewhat ghostly. It's like I'm releasing these life-imbued images that are trapped in these walls and other materials. I do believe that walls can absorb traces of events that take place around them and these end up adding more layers to their surfaces.To me, art is a means to an end. I use it to try to contribute positively to this chaotic world.

8 - Did you watch the NBA all star game? It was in LA...

Not all of it but I managed to catch a few moments. It was interesting, but most people seemed to be focusing mostly on Fergie's rendition of the national anthem. What was that all about?

2. Why do you create yours the way you do, rather than simply painting it onto the walls, and do you think the people living 38,000 years ago would have had any of the same reasons for choosing their technique? Why or why not?

In technical terms yes, there might have been a similar response to the material reality they were dealing with, but probably not in conceptual terms. I began exploring this subtractive technique after I realised how city walls have become saturated with layers that, in a symbolic way, have captured something of what has taken place around them. To me, walls have the ability to absorb and record these events and that's what I try to bring to the surface. I like to compare it to a new type of urban archaeology. My objective is to make visible the invisible that lies buried beneath these layers. I started my path as a graffiti writer and used to paint walls. One day I realised that instead of simply adding yet another layer of paint, I could work with what was already there. Based on a reverse stencil technique I came up with this method of bas-relief carving which seemed appropriate to interact with the elements that were there. So on the one hand it was fundamentally a solution guided by this concept, while on the other it was a technical response to the material reality I wanted to work with. I can only speculate about what drove the people who created these images 38,000 years ago to these techniques, but it seems likely that it was a logical response to the elements, even if the motives were different from my own.

3. Your style has been described as "brutal and complex, yet imbued with a simplicity that speaks to the core of human emotions." I can't help but think of how cool this is, given that people 38,000 years ago were using similar techniques. I don't really have a question, but maybe you can reflect on how this feels for you to know. Maybe, what are the core human emotions, in your opinion, and how can art throughout time speak to them?

Yes, I believe that these core emotions are still very much the same and that art has been able throughout time to reach out to them, whether they speak of pleasure or displeasure, desires or ambitions, affection or existential anguish, or simply the appreciation of beauty. They developed hand-in-hand with our ability for both abstract and symbolic thought. Regardless of what their original purpose was, the fact that they still make such an impression on us today is revealing of how contemporary they are, how they still speak to who we are as human beings. Visual representation has fascinated us ever since it was first developed. Despite the fact that it has changed and adapted its contents and approach according to each particular context, the basic forms have remained the same. Visual elements can convey complex contents instantly and, in this sense, they form a real universal language. It's no coincidence that our present societies still make use of these elementary forms.

4. What has been the most interesting thing you've learned or seen while creating your work, or that has inspired your work? And what do you think these people were seeing when they made their art in caves 38,000 years ago? 

Art is always a reaction to the surrounding environment. I believe it's a way of responding to and interacting with it, with the purpose of seeking a better understanding. My artwork responds to the urban environment of today, and it seems to me that the people 38,000 years ago were very well-attuned to theirs. We're obviously not sure what they were trying to express or with what purpose, whether it was driven by some magic-ritual or shamanistic intent or something more mundane, but their skills speak of a very high ability to observe in detail what surrounded them and reproduce it with great economy of means. This is indicative of how developed their perception, their thought processes, and their manual dexterity were. There is nothing “primitive” at all about their painting and carving skills. One of the most interesting things I've learnt through my work is how history has a way of repeating itself, despite the change in social and material circumstances, and these findings seem to reinforce this view.

5. Of course the world is quite different today than it was 38,000 years ago. What are you trying to address with your work, and what do you think people were trying to address way back then? 

If you bring it down to the basics, we're probably doing a very similar thing: addressing contemporary reality while trying to understand it and harness something of it for one purpose or another. While we can only speculate about what they were trying to address or communicate back then, most of my work deals with issues surrounding the impact of development and mass visual communication on the identity of individuals and communities in the present day urban environment. I believe in working with the forces of chaos present in the city and making them part of an art that is as transient as the material reality that surround us. I try to harness something of these forces of destruction to create an organic, evolving art which in turn can help humanise our urban spaces while looking into the notions of identity and how people and the places they live in are locked in a cycle of reciprocal shaping.

6. Could we say that you rediscovered this technique that existed thousands of years ago? Why or why not?

I believe this technique has always been there, in one form or another. Despite being seen as a pointillist technique, it can't be seen as fully independent from the fundamental bas-relief carving techniques that have been used in many cultures throughout time. Its main difference is its ability to create through a reductive approach, of reducing an image to its fundamental elements. This economy of means is what makes it so striking, but the overall process has always been there. In this sense I discovered or rediscovered nothing, I'm only following in the footsteps of everything that came before.

2. What about being quoted by Forbes magazine on the Under 30 list? (with Gaia, and Tatiana Fazlalizadeh). Your exact reaction...

Forbes is not exactly the magazine I read religiously every week, but it's definitely great to see my work being appreciated and reaching out to an increasingly heterogenous audience. Especially when you consider it comes from Lisbon and Portugal, viewed by many as a peripheral European country where nothing much happens. It means that an increasingly globalised and homogenised world seems to need more and more local things. The list also shows the positive side of the current generation at a time when we are undergoing a very dark period; which is especially true in southern Europe where we are seeing one of the most qualified generations ever being forced to migrate due to the economic crisis and failed policies. This massive brain drain will affect these regions, which were still lagging behind the rest of Europe in some ways, for years to come. The current situation is explosive and, like many, I'm worried about Europe's cohesion. Integration has become a huge problem and there is also a worrying generation gap, as the younger generation has grown up with a completely different experience than those who occupy the decision-making positions. The world has never changed so fast, and the difference between generations has never been so big, you just have to see how technological advancement has been responsible for this. This gap, along with the usual generalised paternalism, is not making much room for this new generation to help shape the future.

3. Street art has now become mainstream, if you look at the web you find thousands: advantages and disadvantages of this? How to stay on the top, to be relevant?

The social acceptance of this new art form has been very interesting, but its own ubiquity has made it somewhat inevitable. There is a new generation growing up with its presence who accept it as it is. Some of it has become mainstream, but there is also plenty of underground activity. Yes there are many artists who work in galleries now, but most of them continue to create illegally in the streets, and that is where its true nature lies. I believe that both forms can coexist without contradiction. Some aspects of commercialisation can be toxic, but I think that we have to respect the notion that each artist has the right to create wherever he or she feels like it. It's their work, and it's all art, regardless of the location and context it's displayed in.

 

4. What has - dramatically - changed in the last years. What are the more interesting changes your world have experienced.

To be honest not a lot, besides the size of the projects, the size of the team I work with and the studio. The degree of hard work remains the same, my friends are still the same, my ideals are still the same. I do have access to more means to continue creating work though, and that is definitely good.

5. Do you feel part of a generation, a specific group, who are the others? And what is the top 10 of street artists?

This is difficult to answer. In some ways yes, this is a new generation, one that has grown up with the presence of graffiti and street art in the cities they live in and that has witnessed these new forms of graphic and visual expression become part of contemporary visual culture. There is also a growing audience for this new art, one that belongs mainly to the same generation.

Choosing artists is always difficult and I don't like rankings, so I'd rather give you a list of artists whose work I admire, regardless of era or background: Blu, JR, Gordon Matta-Clark, Finok, Katharina Grosse, Os Gêmeos, How and Nosm, Dzine, O'clock, Sainer, Pantónio, Pedro Matos, ±Mais Menos±.

6. Three street artists like Gaia and Vhils are on the Forbes under 30s list, what does it mean, in terms of money…

Nothing really, it's definitely not the list of richest artists for sure.

7. What is your ethic? What has changed, what graffiti art stands for in these days?

My main ethic is to work hard and honestly at what I do. This has remained the same throughout the years, regardless of the type of work or location I do it in, be it a commissioned piece in a gallery, or an illegal piece in the street. I have to juggle many things to pay my bills and have a team that enables me to develop projects large enough to create the right impact that allows to voice the issues I'm trying to explore: to reflect on the complexities of life in contemporary urban societies and the struggle of regular people in face of the current model of socio-economic development that places the emphasis on over-production and over-consumption, and which is fundamentally flawed and mathematically impossible to sustain in the long run.

8. How much street artist earn, from the top to the bottom…

Up until today I have reinvested everything I've earned into all the projects I do. It may change in the future but this is the way I work. I think it must obviously depend on the artist and the means they need to work on their projects. In my case I have a studio with seven full-time collaborators that help out in the projects. On larger projects we hire out more people, depending on the needs. I also run a gallery in Lisbon that tries to help out local and international artists by promoting their work here, and we also manage a public art project that works with the city and its communities. So after all this you don't end up with a lot, but things are definitely more stable now than they were four or five years ago.

9. Do you admire Banksy, why is the one that has been more on the media?

I do, he was always the smartest one around, and yes he's very skilful in manipulating the media when it's usually the other way around.

10. Does street art remain risky?

Yes, when it is illegal it is still risky. It also depends on the location. Try to do something in China, Pakistan, or even London. It's not as accepted as you may think. Even if you have more and more legal projects, the true strength of street art and graffiti lies in its element of surprise and illegal nature, the way in which it contributes towards changing people's perceptions and interacts with them, the way it is taking over every part of the city.

[Interview by Laura Piccinini]

At what time you adopted the name Vhils ... what is its significance?

Like most other graffiti writers, I experimented with a few other names in the street. I eventually started writing Vhils purely for formal reasons: I liked the letters that compose it, the combination they create. They were good to write and paint, and worked well with each other. I chose it for that reason alone. So it was created, it has no meaning. When I started exhibiting my work in galleries I was already known as Vhils, so I decided to use it alongside my real name.

How was your development from the different techniques, tools and content of your work?

Most of my work is based on this notion of creative vandalism I came across in graffiti, so everything started there, even the idea of working with abrasive and destructive tools and techniques. I was also influenced by what I saw in the streets of Portugal when I was growing up. Street posters are rarely removed here, so they create these thick agglomerates, which I one day began using as a canvas, by cutting through their layers. I had been using stencils for a while, when I realised I could reverse the process and start removing layers from these posters instead of adding more layers of paint to create compositions. When I started cutting through them, I noticed that fragments of older posters came to light, and I immediately connected this with my memory of the old walls in Lisbon that seemed to be steeped in history, as if the passage of time added new layers and buried some of the past beneath. Carving through these posters was like carving through layers of the city's recent history. I realised how chaotic life in the city is, how fast things change with the transformations of development and technology. As a child, I had been fascinated with the contrast created by the old political murals painted after the 25th April 1974 revolution and the new capitalist advertisements of the 1980s/1990s and I made a connection between all of this. I started using the stencil as a tool to dig into these layers, revealing fossils of contemporary culture. I eventually moved on to carving walls and started the Scratching the Surface series, based on this same concept, which became a reflection on all the different layers that form us.

 

Who are the artists that have influenced your work?

I can't positively say that have been direct influences on my work. On me as a person, yes, but it's not really the same thing. I am influenced and impressed by many things, and maybe small, mundane details of daily life affect my work more than the influence of other artists, but I do admire the work of many artists. I first started by following the work of older graffiti writers I saw around Lisbon when I was growing up, then other international graffiti writers. There are too many to mention. Graffiti was my gateway to the world of art, so back then I was better acquainted with the work of the old New York graffiti style masters than with Picasso or other renowned artists. When I began working with stencils and discovered the work Banksy was doing it had a great impression on me, but this was more to do with the whole attitude and his approach to working in the street than his style or subject matter. I was also deeply impressed by the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Nowadays I admire the work of artists like Os Gêmeos, Barry McGee, Faile, Interesni Kazki, Cyrcle, JR, Blu, Word 2 Mother, Conor Harrington, How and Nosm and many others.

In your work, there is a principle to destroy to build, how would you describe and define your work?

When I decided to reverse the technique of stencilling and began creating compositions based on removing layers instead of adding them (which explored the notion of creative destruction I had brought from graffiti vandalism), I started looking at the stencil as a window that allowed me to dig into things and reveal something of the past, which I began conceptualising as a new type of symbolic archaeology. So I've often described it as a work that uses the stencil as a window to reveal what lies beneath the surface of things, exposing beauty through destructive means.

Seems certain tools, such as the use of explosives, leave room for the unexpected ... How have control over the outcome of your work?

The aim has always been to work with the unexpected, to incorporate it into the work, to experiment with and work along with the forces of nature, not against them. In this sense I have never wanted full control over the results. I like this idea of working with randomness and the unexpected and leaving room for them in my work. I never really consider my work finished, as I know that nature, be it through the action of time or the weather and other elements, will always have the final say. I expect and welcome this transformation, it is also part of the piece. When I see pieces I carved a few years ago that have been taken over by natural decay, or are covered in moss, or fading, I finally think they are becoming part of the wall, through the action of nature. I have also always been deeply interested in experimenting with all sorts of materials and tools, the more abrasive the better. I enjoy the randomness of the results and working with mistakes.

 

Who are the faces of your work, how do you choose?

The faces started out as a statement against the futility of the people represented in advertising and the sick consumerism surrounding the notion of celebrities. To contrast those fictitious, artificial constructions with real, regular people who were unknown. It played with the notion of creating “unknown icons” that could represent normal people. I used to photograph people in the streets and base the portraits on them. Some are also composites of several people, so they don't represent just one person. In some of the larger projects, such as those I recently did in Brazil, or China and other places, the people portrayed are connected with the place and the nature of the project. In Rio, for example, I depicted some of the people who lived in some of the slums in the city centre (Morro da Providência and Ladeira dos Tabajaras) who are being evicted due to a process of urban renovation that is connected with an ongoing process of gentrification ahead of the World Cup and the Olympic Games.

 

Generally urban art reflects society voices, political, social or cultural. What is the meaning or content of your work?

The process actually reveals a lot about the content in my work. I try to dig into the several layers that form our material and cultural reality and bring to light fragments of the past, elements that have been discarded and buried with the passage of time. This is a way of making a critical reflection about the fast-paced model of development we are following, with its cycles of consumption and waste. I compare it to a form of symbolic archaeology that aims to make people reflect on these issues that nowadays form the backbone of the urban societies we live in – these artificial, yet alluring places where the level of visual and ideological noise has reached an unbearable stage which is driving us apart from each other.

 

Today urban art is becoming more accepted and recognized by virtually everyone, but beyond the streets, also exhibited galleries and museums, how has this process, what happened ... and what's next for urban art?

I believe it's only natural for urban art to become increasingly accepted and generate interest, as it really has made a mark on cities around the world. It's become a phenomenon for this age. I also believe that in some ways it is easier to understand or assimilate for many people than contemporary conceptual art, which has become increasingly distant from daily life and says nothing to the majority. Urban art interacts with people in the streets, where they can see it and are free to like it or not. But despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly adopted by the mainstream culture (in galleries, advertising or consumer goods), what is produced in the streets will always remain raw and real. There is a growing trend now for large-scale murals which, being commissioned works, are becoming a new form of public art. This simple thing seemed unthinkable a few years ago, but there is great demand for it now. So, who can say what will happen in five or ten years' time?