On what should be good news for a Portuguese artist, Alexandro Farto aka Vhils just saw his name “defaced” on national tv. Well, you’ll see what I mean inside.
Meet “man in black” w/ Bradley Cooper
Vhils work is based on a piece that is chiseled, covered with explosives and blown up in order to expose the inner piece of the wall. What cuatro did looks like a wall in front of another, basically just covering up for the other one behind, but in which they don’t really seem to touch. Besides, they give more attention to the explosives (which are huge to ever give a detailed piece) then they do to whatever they “supposedly” create. In the beggining of the video, the man in black explains there were 5 people working for 3 days, with 3 explosive experts and 25kgs of explosive for this piece. For that ammount of work, I’d be curious to what would get out of here too. So, for the first explosion, they will represent darkness, and for that we get…
A skull.
And for the second explosion we want light, so we’ll get…
A smile
Plus a blatant copy of the LOVE word/wall with no apparent reason (Orelha Negra clip).
So, for a generic tv channel that’s part of Mediaset España Comunicación, which translates to 22% of the tv platform in Digital+ satellite (according to Wikipedia), that brings on international actor Bradley Cooper for a show with a man in black that talks no more than 20 seconds, teams of experts, slow motion cameras, this is pretty shameful. Even more, when they promote it on tv as being Vhils technique, and what they show is a mediocre work. If not, look below at the pièce de résistance, or the major final piece that included 2 mega explosives…
Just in case you don’t know how Vhils work looks like.
