LOOP Barcelona
Main Section
Room 215
Almanac Barcelona
21 – 23 November 2023

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils

“The project was executed in Barreiro, a city on the southern margin of the Tagus river, right across from Lisbon, which used to be part of a massive rust-belt area. This place holds an important significance for me because it is where I was born and raised. The portrait created by the explosion is based on archive pictures of workers from the factory that once stood here, and which at its height employed a workforce of over 30.000 people. It pays homage to them all, but is also a testament to ephemerality, even of the most enormous and complex industrial infrastructures. I have symbolically crystallised this artwork in a digital format as a new digital industrial era is approaching at full speed, in a timeframe and territory where our presence will be progressively less evident.”
– Alexandre Farto

Other video works

Since 2014, Vhils (Alexandre Farto) has been shooting, at extremely slow speeds, everyday views of cities all over the world: Beijing, Cincinnati, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Macau, Mexico City, Paris, and Shanghai, being just some of the cities where he worked, and that involve us and grab our attention.

Vhils uses footage captured in major cities of the globalized world. Which is to say, Vhils worked these images in a world still accelerated and dizzying, which considered itself immune to any setback or any slowing down. But by submitting these everyday images that he gathered to a brutal deceleration, he opposed the myth of the modern, contemporary (or even post-modern) velocity to an unusual metaphorical slowing down.

The anonymous inhabitants of cities, who are defined in the 19th Century by Gogol, Poe, or Baudelaire, have characteristics of isolation and massification accentuated by the 20th Century, turning these very inhabitants from literary characters into film characters. They are confronted, here and now, with their own helplessness and final desperation. The body and the global destiny of the global beings of every city in the world exist and are immersed here in an atmosphere too dense for them to move normally. The simple events they undertake (crossing the street, walking on a sidewalk, meeting an interlocutor, looking at a building’s façade) while developing in the slow rhythm imposed on them, seeming as if they are prevented from really concluding themselves, or are we, the viewers, the ones prevented from watching their conclusion — all is suspended in a never-ending in-between time.

OVR: Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Fenestra, solo exhibition, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2021

BIO

Portuguese visual artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils (b. 1987) has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with nonconventional tools and techniques, establishing symbolic reflections on identity, the relationship of interdependence between people and the surrounding environment, and life in contemporary urban societies, as well as the impact of development, the passage of time, and material transformation. Having begun to interact with the urban environment through the practice of graffiti in the early 2000s, Vhils has been hailed as one of the most innovative artists of his generation. His poignant, poetic portraits chiselled into flaking walls can be seen adorning cityscapes around the world. Based on his aesthetics of vandalism, Vhils destroys as a means to create. He carves, cuts, drills, etches and blasts his way through the layers of materials. Yet, like an archaeologist, he removes in order to expose, bringing to light the beauty that lies trapped beneath the surface of things.

Since 2005, he has presented his work in over 30 countries around the world in solo and group exhibitions, site-specific art interventions, artistic events and projects in various contexts – from working with communities in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to collaborations with well-reputed artistic and museological institutions such as the MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (2022);  Museum  Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2020); Le Centquatre-Paris, Paris (2018); CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2017); Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2016); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); EDP Foundation, Lisbon (2014); and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego (2010), among others. An avid experimentalist, besides his groundbreaking bas-relief carving technique – which forms the basis of the “Scratching the Surface” project –, Vhils has been developing his personal aesthetics in a plurality of media: from stencil painting to metal etching, from pyrotechnic explosions and video to sculptural installations. He has also directed several music videos, short films, and two stage productions.

His work is represented in several public and private collections in various countries.

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