Wood
An integral part of his oeuvre, Vhils has been making prolific use of wood as a source material since first experimenting with it in 2009. This has mostly taken the form of carving wooden objects with the aid of hand tools – mainly doors, shutters and panels recovered from derelict buildings and sites. The material and conceptual link with the urban environment lies in their status as discarded objects, part of the waste the city generates during its cycles of destruction and creation in its ever-ambitious expansion.
While the carved portraits seek to imbue these wooden components with a symbolic representation of life, the patterns, motifs, and signage elements that can be seen encroaching on them, along with the forced agglutination of disparate fragments, all speak of how human identity is becoming increasingly impacted by the city’s dissonant visual discourse, leaving little room for its citizens to become who they really are, free from external, partisan influence.
The artist’s gesture further subverts the worthlessness of the original articles by elevating them to prized aesthetic objects – transferring them from the profane space of the landfill to the sacred space of the gallery. Vhils’ recurrent use of wooden doors also intends to symbolise the correlation and opposition between the private and public realms – the two spheres that dictate our relationship with society and the world at large.
