P IS FOR PORTUGAL

To be honest, I am visually attracted to virtually anything that is white and blue. Perhaps, it’s my greek blood or the fact that my mom has a bathroom in her house decorated fully in Delft patterns. But also I certainly feel like the most beautiful creations of world ceramics are white and blue. And Portuguese/Spanish azulejo, while coming in different colors, is most striking in white and blue. Add Fuel, whose real name is Diogo Machado, is a young Portuguese artist from Cascais who incroporates traditional azulejo patterns and his illiustrations into amazing works of street art. He covers fuse boxes, walls and whole buildings in his artworks, and the results are as complex as Portuguese history, on the precipice between the Moor rule and colonial Europe. But Add Fuel is also reimagining and reevaluating everything for the new century. It makes me happy.