Vhils doesn't paint on top of a wall. He drills into it and stops when the wall shows him a face.
Eleven thousand tiles under an airport
Portuguese street artist Alexandre Farto, who works as Vhils, built his latest commission out of more than 11,132 azulejos, the glazed ceramic tiles that cover buildings across Portugal. The piece, called Strates Urbaines, sits inside the new Paris-Orly train station built for the Grand Paris Express transit project. It runs 35 meters long and 7 meters high across two underground levels, according to Ardian, the investment firm that sponsored the work.
The mural layers a map of Paris and the Eiffel Tower into the tile surface, and sets cobalt blue sections to work like mirrors, so travelers passing through see their own reflection folded into the image of the city they're about to enter or leave. Street Art Cities lists the piece as unveiled in June 2024, and it remains one of the largest permanent public commissions the artist has produced.
The technique that got him here
Vhils was born in 1987 and grew up in Seixal, an industrial suburb across the river from Lisbon, during a decade of heavy urban redevelopment that would later become his subject. He studied at Central Saint Martins in London and started out as a graffiti writer before shifting to the technique that made his name: carving. According to Street Art Bio, he debuted a carved portrait alongside Banksy at London's Cans Festival in 2008, using chisels, jackhammers, drills, etching acid and bleach to strip a wall down layer by layer until a face appears in what's left. It's subtraction, not addition. Every piece starts as a full surface and ends as whatever he's chosen to remove.
From city walls to a president's portrait
That technique has carried Vhils from illegal walls into some of the most formal commissions a street artist can get. He carved the first official bas-relief presidential portrait in Portugal's history, a piece of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa now hanging in the country's Portrait Gallery. The Orly station piece works the same way, at a different scale and for a different kind of audience: instead of one face, the traveling public sees a city's own skyline peeled back at them.
What an airport wall is for
Public transit stations don't usually commission work this large from a single artist, and Grand Paris Express is a rare case of a transit authority treating a station as gallery space instead of just infrastructure to move people through. Vhils' faces are never celebrities. Sortiraparis notes his work across the Paris region typically draws on the people and history specific to each site rather than famous faces borrowed from elsewhere. At Orly, that means the closest thing to a portrait subject is the city itself, carved into the tiles that thousands of travelers will walk past without stopping, until the blue catches their own reflection and they do.
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