The artist, Vhils (aka Alexandre Farto), is known for his incredible, tactile murals carved literally into the walls of buildings. And we just can’t get enough of his work — it’s stunning. His transformative art pieces strip away layers of paint and concrete to form beautiful images, often of faces. It seems unbelievable that one could get the level of detail he achieves. Even when watching the process from start to finish it’s hard to believe that it isn’t manipulated in some way.
Take his work with explosives. You may have seen his process in a music video collaboration with Orelha Negra. In the video, which has nearly a million views, the Portuguese artist uses carefully placed and timed explosives to reveal a face in the wall. The result is a hypnotizing, visual treat as you watch the wall explode in slow motion. The smoke clears and there’s a face left where there was just a wall before. There’s something so satisfying in watching something beautiful appear instantly out of nothing.
Vhils’ use of destruction to create more permanent pieces in the walls of decrepit and abandoned buildings has made him an important voice in the street art scene. And it makes his work so unique amongst his peers. Recently, I chatted with Vhils about his distinctive artwork, his process, and the way he looks under the surface of what is there to stretch the bounds of what is possible in street art.
What brought you to street art and graffiti?
At the age of ten I started noticing a growing presence of graffiti on the walls in my hometown and was immediately attracted to it. I soon started drawing and sketching and eventually became involved with the local graffiti scene. This became my gateway to the visual arts.
In my late teens, I started thinking about what I was doing and where I wanted to go from there and began experimenting with new techniques and tools. When I discovered stencilling I was immediately attracted to its possibilities, and things just evolved naturally from there.
Who would you say were your early influences?
When I first started out I used to follow closely the work of other graffiti writers, especially those who were active around Lisbon at the time. There are quite a few artists whose work I do admire, although I feel that my work has been more influenced by the small, mundane details of life than by other people’s work. Banksy’s attitude and approach on how to use the public space effectively to communicate your ideas and interact with a large audience were 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. Gordon Matta-Clark was also a major reference for his ability to work with architectural structures in connection with a reflection on urban decay and its effects on people and communities living in the urban environment. But I also admire the work of many other artists.
You use so much destruction in your art to create something new. Can you talk about the symbolism behind carving into walls?
Although some of my work is based on non-destructive techniques, most of it can be described as employing destructive methods towards a creative purpose. This is both a technique and a concept which derived from my involvement with illegal graffiti, where the notion of creative vandalism is very much present. The concepts of creation and destruction, construction and deconstruction are closely linked. Everything you create starts by destroying and replacing something that was there before. By using these methods I’m trying to contrast the destructiveness of the methods with what I hope is the poetic beauty of the results.
It’s like accessing the city’s recent history, and I look at this process of carving as an act of contemporary archaeology. Walls, which are composed of different layers, reflect the passage of time. This is how I started the “Scratching the Surface” project, which ultimately became a reflection on all the different layers that form us, as individuals, cultures, and histories.
You work with so many different materials. Can you talk a little bit about the different approaches you take when you’re working with a wall vs wood or metal?
The first major differences between these mediums are perhaps scale and location. Wall pieces are usually created outdoors and on a large scale, while the bodies of work with wood and metal mediums are usually, but not exclusively, worked on a smaller scale and presented indoors. These alone demand a different approach in both the planning and the execution stages of the process. For walls, you have to work in more demanding conditions with lots of unknown variables – you have to find a wall, test its density and consistency to determine the depth at which layer can be carved. It also involves more logistics and a different set of tools. I use hammer drills to carve walls and also a cherry picker for larger pieces. Walls are also painted beforehand.
With the smaller pieces in wood and metal, I can work in the studio, so this alone gives me more time and very different conditions. Just like the wall pieces, the carving process in wood is also based on achieving the right degree of contrast which is usually provided by the difference in colour between the surface of the wood and its interior. If the medium lacks contrast I might need to stain the surface with a darker shade. These pieces are usually worked with the aid of either a Dremel rotary tool, a hammer and chisel, or even a utility knife, depending on the consistency of the material.
Despite being very different mediums, both the walls and the wood pieces follow a similar process – an image that has been worked beforehand on the computer is either painted directly or projected onto the surface and then carved.
The metal pieces follow a very different process as they are etched with the aid of nitric acid, following a process very similar to engraving. The areas that are meant to be preserved are coated with an oil-based acid-resistant bitumen before being placed in an acid bath. Some images are applied entirely by hand while others are screen printed onto the surface. Once the acid has eaten into the surface each plate is then placed outdoors and left to dry, to achieve a process of natural corrosion. The production of these pieces might take weeks.
One thing that all these mediums share is that I never regard the pieces are being entirely finished. The idea is for them to keep evolving and changing over time, either becoming absorbed into the surrounding space, in the case of walls, or reflecting the natural transformation of the materials in the case of the pieces in wood and metal.
You use explosives in your art. How did that come about? And what are the challenges you face working with such dangerous material?
The use of explosives occurred as a natural development from carving walls and other surfaces with industrial tools. It can be seen as the culmination of both the process begun with carving billboards and which then evolved to walls and other mediums, and also of the concept of using destructive means to create. The idea itself came about when the world, and Europe in particular, was hit by the most recent economic crisis. At the time I was looking for a process that was even more destructive in order to emphasize the notion that during times of social and economic crisis everything which we hold as certain becomes highly volatile and explosive.
I started using (explosives) in late 2010 for a specific project titled “Detritos” (Detritus) which involved creating three videos for an exhibition, while also using the same footage to direct a music video for the Portuguese band Orelha Negra. Since then, I have used the same technique to create other art videos and music videos, always in collaboration with an expert in pyrotechnics who helps me to create controlled explosions. Putting the idea into practice was very demanding, especially the first set of trials. We experimented for some 8 months before we got everything right for the first video. We were literally breaking new ground, and even the specialist wasn’t sure how to proceed as he’d never used explosives like this before. It was all trial and error, very time consuming, but once we got it right the results were fantastic.
I love your portraits, can you tell me a little bit about how you choose a subject?
The choice of subject depends greatly on the nature of the project at hand. While many of the portraits I use in my works are real – meaning they belong to real people I photographed and which haven’t been digitally edited or retouched – there are others that are composites created from blending several photographs of different people. This depends mainly on the context/location and what is being explored in a particular project. Often, when there is a direct relation between the person and the location, I use an untouched portrait. If, on the other hand, the objective is a collective representation but it only makes sense (due to a variety of factors, including available space) to carve one portrait, I resort to creating a composite so it speaks of all in general but no one in particular.
How do you choose a neighborhood for your pieces?
This also depends on the nature of the project and the relationship both it and the subject have to a particular place. If it’s within the scope of an organised event I usually have a location chosen for me beforehand and will stick to it if the conditions are good. On the other hand, if it’s part of a personal project, locations might be chosen for their connection to what is being explored and the conditions they offer: high visibility, context, layers, etc. Some of the portraits have a special connection with the place they are carved in, but not all. In most projects I like to portray ordinary, anonymous people who can be seen as representative of a global reading of local realities.
What ideas and concepts are moving or intriguing you these days?
The same concepts that I’ve been exploring in my work: palimpsest, transience, decay, destruction, context…
If you had to choose a philosophy that described you as an artist, what would it be?
Creative destruction.
