ACC - Festival 2012 - Vhils

Vhils is the pseudonym of Portuguese street artist Alexandre Farto, one of the most skilled and talented young artists on the urban art scene today. This internationally acclaimed innovator creates technically skilled portraits on the streets around the world – however, instead of only adding paint or other common street art materials onto surfaces, Vhils also carves, drills, scratches, rips and blasts his images out of architectural walls. 

By using construction tools, Vhils exposes the surfaces of the buildings and in turn confronts the narratives of the cityscape. By using acid and bleach, he begins to carve out the canvas and create texture, layers, and different dimensions. Vhils then sculpts the image using  hammers, chisels, and rotary hammer drills. 

The majority of his subjects are anonymous and formerly unremarkable urban citizens: "I like the idea of turning ordinary, common people into icons, to contrast this with the need people seem to have to create icons in the first place. Instead of creating icons out of people who have changed history, like what Andy Warhol was doing with Mao and others, I take an ordinary person and try and make people think about the ordinary citizens who struggle every day to make a living in contemporary society."