Vhils (aka Alexandre Farto) grew up beside Lisbon’s concrete and advertising posters—places where the city’s history piled up in layers of paint, plaster, and paper. That patchwork of surface and decay stuck with him. He turns walls into diaries, peeling back what’s been added to expose what lives underneath.

He started as a graffiti writer in the early 2000s, tagging Seixal’s suburbs, catching glimpses of industrial growth, loss, and the vanishings in between. But he always wanted more than color splashed across brick. He began carving—chiseling, cutting, drilling, sometimes even using explosives—to reveal portraits, shadows, human traces trapped in layers of urban neglect. The toolset is loud, but the outcome is hauntingly quiet.

Vhils’ signature technique, Scratching the Surface, is a kind of reverse construction. Instead of building up, he digs down—into walls, old billboards, metal plates, salvaged surfaces. The portraits that emerge often belong to people you almost know (or maybe someone who lives two blocks away). They look out, not shouting, but insisting you see them. These works reflect on identity, on the friction between personal story and public facade, on time’s weight pressing down on cities that grow fast and forget quickly.

His media stretch wide: bas-relief murals, sculpture, installations, stencil etchings, videos. He experiments with tools you don’t always expect—acid, bleach, metal engraving, even pyrotechnic blasts. One work might be fragile portrait on a wall whose paint is peeling; the next might be a massive carved face looming from a billboard, full of texture and legend.

Watching a Vhils mural is like reading a city’s autobiography backwards. Layers of graffiti, adverts, and posters peel off so faces, shapes, and memories locked under surface get their turn to speak. It’s destructive, yes, but in that destruction there’s respect—for history, for individual lives, for the shape of humanity running through cracked plaster and concrete.

The tension in his work comes from that push-pull: decay and dignity, erosion and arrival. He builds by removing, raises portraits by chiseling away what hides them. The physicality of his processes—hammering, drilling, etching—makes you aware of space, surface, and what lies beyond casual sight.

If you want to wander through walls that whisper back, faces emerging from decay, and art that reminds you there’s always more beneath what we see, drop by Vhils’ site: vhils.com. It’s where broken surfaces become poems.