When people tend to think of art, they often picture the creation or the production of a tangible object.  However, art can also be created through destruction. This is the mantra of Portuguese street artist Vhils whose work is carved out of existing objects in urban spaces.

Vhils is most notably known for chipping and drilling away at plaster and stone on building walls to create complex and poetic subtractive drawings of faces and portraits. 

Vhils (Alexandro Fartos) was born in Portugal in 1987 and spent a large portion of his youth living on the outskirts of Lisbon. He studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and currently resides in London and Lisbon.

He first gained prominence as a street artist when one of his art pieces debuted alongside one of Banky’s public art pieces in 2008. Viewers were awed by the manner in which he selectively removed plaster and stone on the side of a building to reveal his piece: a captivating close-up of two human faces.

 One of the unique aspects of Vhils’ subtractive art is its sustainable design. He doesn’t add material to his subtractive art pieces but instead removes material from existing objects as a way of highlighting the transient nature of our surroundings.

The city is his canvas, and he’s more than happy to employ his subtractive reverse-stencil technique to decorate it. His first attempt at removing material was on a thick mass of advertisement posters he found on the street.

Vhils found that the material he excavated got older the deeper he went, and he began to view his act of excavation as a form of “contemporary archeology” that uncovered pieces of past events which had been overprinted by later ones.

He would later experiment with removing material from walls to create his art pieces. He debuted his first wall piece in Lisbon in 2007.

The creation of Vhils’ work is also intriguing to watch, as he employs the use of chisels, hammers, drills, and etching chemicals to selectively remove material from his urban space canvases.

Vhils enjoys experimenting and taking on new challenges. He once used explosive charges to carve wall pieces for a project without any prior experience.  

However, not all of Vhils’ art pieces are destructive. For example, his Diorama Series was created with styrofoam and cork using non-destructive means. But his work is mostly focused on destruction as his objective is to “work with nature and not against it”.

Vhils often checks up on his past pieces that still reside in public urban spaces. He doesn’t seem too worried about them degrading or being damaged, as he believes everything has its own lifespan.

His objective is for his pieces to change over time and to become integrated with the walls of the city they were carved from.  A process that is inevitable for everything we create.