We first saw Alexandre Farto’s (Vhils) work in person at the Outsiders show last fall in NYC.  To say the least, we were impressed.  So it is with excitement that we can tell you that this Friday he has his first solo show, even if you win the rat race you’re still a rat, opening at Vera Cortes in Lisbon, Portugal.  After the jump, a couple more images and a roughly google translated press release

Alexandre Sick exposes “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat” in Vera Cortes, Agency of Art in Lisbon on January 9 to 21 February 2009. About the show itself publishes the text of Cíntia Gil.

Alexandre Sick (aka Vhils) is an artist who has been building a road which is a dynamically confluir plasticity with an intense social and political thought provocative and direct. Although many of its work and submit slogans clear and direct statements, the policy statement of its work subverts the idea that the political is through communication – here, the policy is made: now, from the first minute, from the desire that creates an image. This inherent strength to their work has grown with the artist himself: a story of life on the observation and intervention in urban space, as a quiet worker who recognizes and highlights in each area to humanity demands it, hide or smashes – Alexandre concentrated Sick It is early in a systematic work of encounter between two increasingly distant worlds: the city and those who inhabit it – the mirror is made anonymous.

If, before, Alexandre Sick developed a work on the face – to face the sun’s face, the face and place a maximum of violence and renewal – for their work now performed as a return to the starting point: the city – the the common place where the faces are diluted and constitute the basis of an abstract system of creating personalities standard – the place where the common and the community become almost irreconcilable concepts continuously. The face of the city, we would say, it is a matter of highlighting the work of human density that is, the weaknesses that make their relationships, their routes, the directions of the eyes and words that do not cross each day -place. Return, or rather, to reconfigure the city as place – relational, historical, focusing on identity (M. Augé). Turning to the issue of the face, the creation of posts, on an issue latent in every subject and every element of the city – the seats can be transparent, the passage from one to the other, give input to unexpected people, strangers to their planning and administration.

The Agency of Art Vera Cortés, Alexandre Sick presents its first solo exhibition. About too obvious question about the exhibition space and the intentions of their work, Alexander responds with disturbing the simplicity that characterizes his work: this is also an area of the city, the walls can dig up the transparency or at least until the porosity that allows the individual to enter.

“Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat” – the power over the other is an illusion that results from the opacity of the walls we place all around us.

Gil Cíntia