Alexandre Farto a.k.a. Vhils: Spectra

Alexandre Farto, a.k.a. VHILS, was born in 1987 in Portugal. He became active in Lisbon in the early 2000s in the world of graffiti artists. In 2008, he was invited by Banksy to participate in the Cans Festival in London, where his work was immediately hailed as one of the most innovative in recent years on the urban art scene. He now regularly presents exhibitions in major institutions around the world, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, or the Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, where his first monographic exhibition in the United States was held in 2020. He lives and works between London and Lisbon.
Hammers, chisels, corrosive chemicals, electric perforators are his tools of choice. The creation of a new piece typically involves banging on it, scouring it, drilling through it, even blowing it up with explosives. Instead of adding to a surface, VHILS removes parts of the successive layers that make up a wall or a facade. Successive layers with their particular colors and textures that bring in a wide range of different shades to the whole composition. But the artist is far from only doing walls, he works on discarded doors found on the street, metal sheets, blocks of concrete, accretions of advertising posters... Whatever the medium, each piece is given the same sort of treatment, receiving the mark of what he calls an aesthetic of vandalism.
This very act of carving through the thickness of things, which he refers to as scratching the surface, is for the artist a gesture loaded with meaning. "In this act of excavation," he says, "it is the process that is expressive, more than the end result." All those superimposed layers are the memory of the city, the memory of the transformations, developments, renovations that outline its history. For the artist, to reveal those layers is to render visible the developments of our societies.