Alexandre Farto carves faces out of walls for a living. He drills into them, chisels them, sometimes burns them with acid, cutting through layers of paint and grime until a face rises out of the surface underneath. Portugal just hired him to make its president's official portrait. He didn't touch a wall this time. He carved a president out of newspaper instead.
A street artist gets the job usually reserved for painters
Farto works under the name Vhils. He grew up in Seixal, outside Lisbon, and started as a teenage graffiti writer tagging trains before he decided spray paint was disposable and started scratching his images directly into surfaces instead. That method, part demolition and part sculpture, made him one of the best-known street artists working today, with commissioned excavation pieces from Lisbon to Hong Kong to London.
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa picked Vhils to make his official state portrait as his second term wound down, a choice Observador reported broke with a tradition of oil-painted state portraits stretching back decades in Portugal's Galeria dos Retratos. Rebelo de Sousa's second term ended on March 9, and the finished portrait was unveiled at the Museu da Presidencia in the final week of his mandate, according to Portugal Decoded.
The president's face, built from a decade of headlines
Vhils started with a photograph shot by Rui Ochoa, the president's official photographer. Then he picked through newspapers and magazines covering ten years of Rebelo de Sousa's time in office and layered them into a base. From there he did what he always does: excavation. He drilled, punctured and eroded the paper until a face rose out of the wreckage of headlines, built in bas-relief instead of paint, as Sul Informacao detailed.
The finished piece keeps fragments of those old front pages visible around the president's broad smile, so the material itself carries the record of the decade it depicts. It is the same logic Vhils has worked with for years on the street: peel back the surface and the history underneath does the talking. For this piece the surface was newsprint instead of a billboard, and the wall was a museum instead of a city block.
A street technique walks into a room full of oil paintings
The Galeria dos Retratos at the Palacio de Belem holds painted portraits of Portugal's heads of state going back to the birth of the republic. Vhils is the first artist in that room whose material is newsprint and whose method has more in common with a construction site than a studio easel.
It is a strange kind of validation for a movement that spent decades getting its practitioners arrested for doing the same thing to the wrong walls. Vhils built his career defacing surfaces on commission from cities and brands that once would have prosecuted him for doing it without permission. Now a sitting head of state has hung the result next to portraits of the men who ran the country when tagging a train could get a teenager locked up.
Vhils has never fully left that teenage habit behind. His large-scale wall pieces still use the same excavation logic as the newspaper portrait: strip away what is already there instead of adding to it. The difference this time is where the finished piece hangs, and who asked for it.
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