Forget spray-paint and posters. For Portuguese artists, Alexandre Farto, it’s all about acid, bleach, hammers, chisels, drills and stencils.

Rad or what? Here’s what he has to say about it:

“The development of this line of work has essentially two bases: one is graffiti in its most destructive side, which I have been connected to for many years; the second is the stencil technique that I discovered while I was looking for new paths that allowed me to express a new way of communication. From the first one I picked up the concept of destruction as creative strength – based on this idea I developed a way of work that uses the removal, decomposition or destruction. The concept is the idea that we are made by a series of influences that shape us throughout historical layers, etc, that come from the environment where we grew up. In a very symbolic way I believe that if we remove some of these layers, showing other ones, we can bring to surface some of the stuff we left behind, forgotten things that are still part of what we are today.

Technology is changing things so quickly that we don’t have enough time to think about what is changing (new layers), what is affecting us. I try to underline this process in general, my work can be seen as a kind of archeology that tries to understand what is hidden behind things. These ideas found expression when I started to experiment with the stencil technique and understood that I could revert the process to have more impact: instead of creating while adding layers, I explored the idea of creating by removing layers. I experimented with this process using several methods – cutting clusters of posters, corroding silkscreen ink with acid, etc. – and naturally things started to gain a brutal and raw shape.

When I passed the idea to walls it was natural to work with this removal concept, this negative field. The process itself can be brutal and violent, but the result in my opinion, is expressive and poetic. The result was visibly interesting and allowed to start to incorporate the wall as one of the physical components to the intervention, unlike what happened to the painting, where the wall was a base. From there, the usage of explosives was another step that evolved after a lot of research and tests. These testing stages are something really nice to do, it’s actually a pleasure, and it usually results as a main part of my work.” -Alexandre Farto

More of his work after the jump!


Sources and photos: Yatzer, Alexandre Farto & abduzeedo