The art of subtraction

Walk & Talk Festival 2012, Açores, Portugal

The wall, being an architectural element that makes the transition between various spaces, which limits altogether a particular location, regardless of its "variants" throughout human life has always been crucial to the development of different civilizations.

Alexandre Farto, begins his journey as an artist in the field of graffiti in the early 20th century. Vhils, his tag (artist name in the field of graffiti) and as most people know him, has a different conception of style that can be defined as street art.

Vhils as an artist, thinks the wall (the screen Graffer) as an architectural space that has a memory, an element that over the years has been gaining thickness, as says the artist "(...) the city walls were reflecting the changes (...) the walls were getting fatter (...). "

All City Canvas Festival, Mexico City, Mexico

Le 4ème Mur Festival, Niort, France

Vhils does not create a new wall thickness. What he proposes is the removal of matter, that over the years were accumulated on the walls of our cities. Poetically it can be defiened that Vhils creates a mark on all generations, in all timelines of history of this built limit, Vhils asks "(...) why should I be one more layer on the wall?"

The most important, or the most present element in the work of this artist is undoubtedly the man, more precisely the human face, because it is the man that creates the cities, and it is the same man that lives and shapes the cities according to their ideologies assumptions, as the artist says that  “ (…)carving a wall with a face of a person (...) is kind of poetic in a sence that the people carve their own cities and the cities are carved by the same people.”

Shanghai, China

FAME Festival 2011, Grottaglie, Italy

For those interested from 5th of July at the Museum of Electricity in Lisbon, Vhils will hold his first solo exhibition: DISSECÇÃO, or DISSECTION in English, presents unpublished works where the artist, a deep reflection between urban space and its interaction with its inhabitants.

More information: vhilsfundacaoedp.com