Every Portuguese president gets an official portrait. Since the practice began, the format never changed: oil on canvas, formal pose, gilt frame, hung in the Museum of the Presidency at Belem Palace next to a row of men who look exactly like what you'd expect a head of state to look like. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa broke that in his final days in office. He gave the job to a man who made his career drilling, chiseling and blasting the surface off building facades until a face showed up underneath.
The artist is Alexandre Farto, known worldwide as Vhils. He does not paint faces onto walls. He destroys walls until a face is what's left. Plaster, paint, brick and concrete get stripped away layer by layer with drills, chisels and small explosive charges until a portrait emerges from the wreckage. It is one of the few street art techniques that cannot be buffed over by a city crew, because there is no surface left to paint on top of. You'd have to rebuild the wall.
The vandal who ended up next to banksy
Farto's break came in 2008 at London's Cans Festival, a Banksy-curated show in a derelict Waterloo tunnel where he carved a face straight into a section of wall next to Banksy's own stencils. A photo of it ran on the front page of The Times. Steve Lazarides, who managed Banksy at the time, started representing him. He was 21.
What followed was two decades of turning demolition into portraiture across five continents: a UNESCO headquarters facade in Paris, a hotel wall in Fremantle, cliffs, freeport walls in Luxembourg, and a long-running series of faces carved into cork, wood and stone back home in Portugal. He trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London before going back to the streets, and by 2015 Portugal had knighted him into the Order of Saint James of the Sword, the same country that used to send police after him for exactly the same work. He works fast and destructively, and he works on things nobody expected to see carved: cork bark, cardboard, human hair, sheets of scavenged newspaper.
Six months in a barreiro studio
The presidential portrait is not carved into a wall. It is built from roughly ten years of Portuguese newspapers, glued down in layers over an image of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa taken by his official photographer, Rui Ochoa, then cut, scraped and burned back until the president's face rises out of a decade of headlines about his own presidency. According to Sabado, Farto spent close to six months on the piece in his studio in Barreiro, working through preparatory studies and several versions in parallel before landing on the final composition.
It is, by the museum's own account, the first official Portuguese presidential portrait that isn't a painting. Ten years of front pages about tax hikes, pandemic briefings and cabinet reshuffles, physically torn apart to build the face of the man they were written about. The choice was announced in February 2026, days before Rebelo de Sousa's second and final term ended on March 9, according to Portugal Decoded.
A frame no president had used before
The unveiling happened at the Museum of the Presidency inside the Palacio Nacional de Belem in Lisbon in early March 2026, with Rebelo de Sousa's staff, family and, notably, one of Farto's childhood teachers in the room. The portrait now sits in the Portrait Gallery alongside every other head of state Portugal has had since the presidency existed, a room where the newest arrival is a decade of shredded newsprint standing in for oil paint. Every other name on that wall got there by sitting still for a painter. Rebelo de Sousa got there by handing the job to the one artist in the country whose whole reputation rests on tearing things apart.
He carved the president, then gave the paycheck away
Here's the part that actually separates this from a novelty commission. Farto donated the portrait to the Presidency rather than taking a fee, and asked that its value go toward buying work by emerging Portuguese artists for the museum's own collection instead. Sabado reports that, on his recommendation, eleven works by emerging artists have already been acquired for the museum, with more purchases planned. A man whose entire early career was built on wrecking other people's walls without permission just used a state commission to fund the next generation of artists who haven't been caught yet.
It's not the first time Farto has treated an institution's walls as raw material rather than a trophy case. He's carved a mural into UNESCO's own Paris headquarters and turned a Lisbon pavement into a portrait of fado singer Amalia Rodrigues using traditional Portuguese calcada mosaic instead of a drill, proof the technique was never really about the tool. It was about tearing into whatever surface was in front of him until something true came out of it.
Why a stencil shop cares
Stencils and Vhils's wall-carving come from the same instinct even if the tools don't match. A stencil isn't drawn, it's cut away, negative space doing the work that a paintbrush can't. Farto just takes that logic literally and applies it to the actual wall instead of a sheet of card: cut away what doesn't belong, and the image was always underneath. A head of state just put that idea in a gold frame next to two hundred years of oil paintings. The vandalism never stopped being vandalism. It just got a better address.
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