With his new series, Vhils chooses Paris as his
terrain of observation, but a Paris stripped of its monumental signs. It is not
the museum-city that interests him, nor the heritage backdrop that fixes the
capital in a stable image. It is another Paris that surfaces here: the one we
pass through more than we inhabit, made of corridors, platforms, carriages, and
thresholds. The raw and tangible surface of this work invites the viewer into a
dialogue with the urban environment from which it appears to have emerged. The
composition presents a central male figure flanked by two other faces, realised
through Vhils's emblematic subtractive sculpting technique on layered
advertising posters. The faces, partially obscured and fragmented by the
removal of white and coloured layers, emerge from the background like phantoms
of former advertisements or forgotten inhabitants, revealing a complex tapestry
of underlying colours with touches of vivid reds, blues, yellows and greens.