Artist: Alexandre Farto aka VHILS

With Latent, Baró begins its collaboration with VHILS, presenting the established contemporary artist in this new phase of his artistic practice with his first solo exhibition in Mallorca. Opening on the occasion of the 2026 edition of Nit de l’Art, Latent occupies the gallery’s two main exhibition spaces and brings together works from several ongoing series. The presentation is accompanied by a critical essay on the artist’s practice by curator and writer Enrique Juncosa.

Latent takes its title from an optical phenomenon that occurs twice each year inside Palma Cathedral (La Seu), when the morning sunlight passing through the cathedral’s great rose window is projected onto the opposite wall, creating the image of a second rose window. For a few minutes, the building produces an image of itself: nothing is added, it simply reveals what was always there. This resonates closely with the artist’s own process. “I normally begin with an existing surface and remove, cut or break through its layers until something that was dormant becomes visible,” Alexandre Farto explains.

Bringing together several bodies of work developed over the years; carved doors, billboards, ceramic tile panels and architectural debris, the exhibition explores VHILS’ sustained engagement with architecture, material and memory. Salvaged from abandoned buildings, carved doors become faces; billboards, once carriers of advertising, are cut and torn until they behave like archaeological sites; the ceramic tile panels take a tradition shared by Portugal and Mallorca and turn an architectural material into a portrait; fragments of demolished buildings are given back an expression. Each body of work offers a different answer to the same question, in the artist’s words: “what does a surface hold beneath what it shows us?”

Working across sculpture, relief carving, installation and site-specific intervention, Alexandre Farto adapts his methods according to the material itself: “what matters is what the process allows the material to reveal,” he notes. For this exhibition, his references extend to a more unexpected dialogue, drawing on the medieval Mallorcan thinker Ramon Llull, who saw geometry as a way of revealing hidden relationships, and on philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman’s idea that what we see looks back at us — an idea VHILS describes as becoming “almost literal” in his work, where the faces that emerge from these surfaces return our gaze.

In his accompanying essay, Enrique Juncosa situates VHILS’ practice within a lineage of artists who have engaged with the material fabric of the city, including Antoni Tàpies, Brassaï, Mimmo Rotella, Jacques Villeglé and Gordon Matta-Clark. He describes the artist’s interventions as “something akin to an archaeological survey,” through which walls and architectural surfaces reveal the histories they contain. For Juncosa, VHILS work constitutes “an art of memory and solidarity,” foregrounding the relationship between architecture, identity and the lived experience of contemporary cities.

Alexandre Farto aka VHILS, established international contemporary artist (b. 1987) has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with non-conventional tools and techniques. He began interacting with the urban environment through the practice of graffiti in the early 2000s. Peeling back the layers of our material culture like a modern-day urban archaeologist, Vhils reflects on the impact of urbanity, development and global homogenisation on landscapes and people’s identities. Destroying to create, he delivers powerful and poetic visual statements from materials the city rejects, humanising depressed areas with his poignant large-scale portraits. Since 2005 he has been presenting his work around the world in exhibitions, events and other contexts – from working with communities in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to collaborations with well-reputed institutions such as MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon); MIMA – Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art (Brussels); Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati); Le Centquatre-Paris (Paris); CAFA Art Museum (Beijing); Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation (Hong Kong); Palais de Tokyo (Paris); and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego), among others. An avid experimentalist, besides his groundbreaking bas-relief carving technique, Vhils has been developing his personal aesthetics in a plurality of media: from stencil painting to metal etching, from pyrotechnic explosions and video to sculptural installations. He has also directed several music videos, short films, and two stage productions.