About the artwork
Produced in 2024, this work entitled Layer perfectly illustrates the singular approach of Vhils (Alexandre Farto), a Portuguese artist renowned for his poetic exploration of urban strata and the collective memory engraved on city walls. Here, Vhils transposes his sculptural language into the medium of silkscreen, creating an entirely unique piece in which successive layers of paper and ink are torn away, eroded and fragmented. The result is a vibrant surface, both textured and lacerated, evoking the torn facades of contemporary urban landscapes. Layer plays on the idea of superimposition and revelation: each torn-off layer reveals traces of another, like a visual archaeology of modern society. Fragments of words, colors and typography - remnants of advertising posters - bear witness to the passage of time and the fragility of collective memory. Here, Vhils transforms an industrial medium into an almost organic material, where destruction becomes an act of creation.
Expert opinion
With Layer, Vhils pushes back the limits of the pictorial and silkscreen gesture to revive his sculptural approach to the wall and the trace. The artist captures the essence of the visual chaos of cities - surfaces saturated with images and messages - to extract a raw, silent beauty. Each tear, each zone of erasure tells a story: that of a world where identities, ideologies and cultures overlap and dissolve.vThis unique silkscreen, halfway between painting, collage and sculpture, condenses Vhils' reflections on urban memory and impermanence. By exposing the scars on the paper, he questions the trace left by man on his environment, but also that which the world leaves on us. Layer is thus a visual metaphor for the passage of time, where each fragment torn away reveals not a loss, but the persistence of life at the heart of the fragile.
About the artist
Alexandre Farto, alias Vhils, Portuguese artist born in 1987. Lives and works in Lisbon (Portugal). He became active in Lisbon's graffiti scene in the early 2000s. In 2008, Banksy invited him to take part in London's Cans Festival, where his work was immediately recognized and celebrated as one of the most innovative on the urban scene in recent years. Today, he exhibits at major institutions around the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, and the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, which is devoting its first monographic exhibition to him in the United States in 2020. Until September 2022, the MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon is dedicating a monumental, immersive exhibition to him, entirely focused on video. In it, the artist develops a new language, presenting an image of the city in slow motion.
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