Substrata brings together FAILE’s vivid, poster-inspired imagery and Vhils’s distinctive approach to portraiture. A face emerges through fragments of lettering, illustrated figures, and overlapping colour, recalling a city wall where successive layers of posters have been pasted, weathered, and torn away. At 100 × 80 cm, the print has a commanding presence, with details that reward a closer look.
FAILE, the Brooklyn-based partnership of Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, have worked together since 1999, drawing on advertising, comics, and street culture across painting, printmaking, and public installations. Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, known as Vhils, approaches the urban landscape through subtraction, carving and cutting into walls, billboards, and other surfaces to reveal portraits within their accumulated layers. In Substrata, these complementary practices meet in an image that invites us to consider how the things we see become part of who we are.
Published by Lisbon’s Underdogs in 2021, Substrata was produced as a giclée on heavyweight 300 gsm archival cotton rag paper in an edition of 200, with 20 artist’s proofs, signed and numbered by the artists. Emerald Room’s impression was acquired directly from the original source and is accompanied by its original documentation, offering collectors a documented example of this distinctive collaboration.