Alexandre Farto, a.k.a. VHILS, is a Portuguese street artist who lives and works in London.
Alongside Banksy, JR, Blu, Conor Harrington, Word To Mother, NeckFace, and Os Gemeos, VHILS is part of the new generation of urban artists, talents capable of reinterpreting the appearance of contemporary cities, using their façades to experiment with new creative forms, often denouncing their alienating and homogenizing nature.
His works are ambitious, complex, and poetic. Vandalism as a form of art, destruction as a form of creation. Torn advertising panels, scraped fabrics, peeled and scratched walls used as both canvas and color. Chisels, hammers, and acids used like brushes. The result is a series of powerful and expressive images. Faces and gazes barely sketched, yet incredibly realistic.
As with every work of art created by subtracting material, it’s dizzying to think that the work is already contained within the material, and the artist simply reveals it.
“I try focusing on the act of destruction to create; this is a notion I first came across in Graffiti, and it has been very influential in my work. I believe we are all formed of different sets of layers: personal, social, cultural, historical and so on. Our social system is the product of this same process of layers, and I believe that by removing and exposing some of these layers, in fact by destroying them, we might be able to reach something purer, something of what we used to be and have forgotten all about. This is obviously in a symbolical sense. So I like to see it as a kind of archaeological work of dissecting the layers of history and time and exposing something which lies beneath all the noise, the clutter, the dirt, searching for an essence which has been lost somewhere along the way.“
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