Portuguese Vhils’ innovative art: from street to museums

Seville, Spain, Feb 5 (EFE).- Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, better known as Vhils, has cut the surface of a street wall formed by posters to compose a panoramic view of the southern Spanish Seville city.

The city profile is part of the Fractal exhibit held at Seville’s Delimbo art gallery, bringing together works made with tiles, with transparent resin and fragments of walls for some of his graffiti.

The exhibit gave him the chance to recreate the work he has done for years in the streets of Lisbon, London, Shanghai, Barcelona or Madrid: carving an image of colossal size of a woman’s face.

The rubble that has been falling off the wall remains on the floor of the gallery, forming part of the exhibition.

“I never know what I will find on the other side of the walls, it is something organic, also a kind of archeology,” he told Efe about his street work.

The artist takes pride in the fact that he uses everything that the city despises and discards or what time and the weather have molded to apparent uselessness as raw material for his work.

While the woman’s face installation pays tribute to flamenco, this work is a symbol of the closeness of Portuguese and Spanish cultures.

Vhils made his first graffiti when he was 12 or 13, in an industrial area of a Lisbon suburb that has a long history of graffiti on the old walls of the factories.

Now he is claimed by museums around the world, because he has been able to develop a personal aesthetic, what he calls processes of “creative destruction”.

In some cases, he has come to use explosives, and others are based on digging like an urban archaeologist until revealing what lies beyond what is visible, beyond simple appearance. EFE

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