Add Fuel

A designer who went looking for a tradition

Diogo Machado was born in 1980 in Cascais, on the coast west of Lisbon, and still lives and works there. He took a degree in graphic design at IADE, the Institute of Visual Arts, Design and Marketing in Lisbon, spent several years in Portuguese design studios and eight months in Munich, and then left commercial work to paint full time.

He began under the full name Add Fuel to the Fire, and the early work looks nothing like what he is known for now: a dark but cheerful universe of slimy, eccentric, grinning creatures, assembled out of an obvious appetite for video games, comics, animation, science fiction, designer toys and the visual culture of the street. Those creatures never went away. They simply went into hiding.

The azulejo

The turn came in 2008, when he was invited to cover an entire building with a giant printed canvas for a festival in his home town. Wanting an image that would say something about being an inhabitant of that city, he worked through a list of Portuguese traditions, among them the Galo de Barcelos and the Arraiolos tapestries, and settled on the azulejo, the tin glazed ceramic tile that lines facades, churches and railway stations all over the country. He shortened his name to Add Fuel and has been working with tile ever since.

What he does with it is a sustained visual joke that rewards patience. From across a street his panels read as perfectly conventional blue and white tilework: symmetrical, tessellated, formally correct, the sort of thing that has covered Portuguese walls for centuries. Step closer and the ornament dissolves into his own cast of characters, eyes and teeth and tentacles locked into the geometry of the pattern, along with contemporary references that have no business being there. The effect depends on trompe l'oeil and on an almost obsessive attention to detail; the pastiche has to be convincing before the subversion can land.

He works in several formats at once. There are genuine ceramic panels of small and medium size, in which the tiles are real. There are large scale murals, painted freehand or through stencils, that imitate tile on surfaces that are nothing of the kind. And there are print editions, which is where most collectors first meet the work.

Walls and commissions

Add Fuel has shown in solo and group exhibitions and has taken part in most of the significant urban art events, from Leeds to Perth, from Los Angeles to Macau. In 2012 he made a ceramic mural some thirty metres long for the Walk and Talk public art festival at Ponta Delgada, in the Azores. In 2022 he painted for the Wynwood Walls in Miami, the mural park that has done more than any other single venue to move street art into a ticketed, collected context.

The commissioned side of his practice is long and varied, and reflects where he came from rather than where the fine art market would like to place him: Alfa Romeo, Burton Snowboards, MTV, Nike, Red Bull, Wired, the Lisbon urban art gallery programme and the designer toy manufacturer Toy2R are all on the list.

What comes to auction

His secondary market is young and thin, and it is spread across object types that have very little to do with one another. At the top are the unique ceramic tile panels, which are laborious, physically fragile and rarely offered. Below them sit works on paper and canvas, then the signed and numbered print editions, which are produced in reasonable quantity and are the most commonly traded thing he makes.

Then there are the toys. His background in designer vinyl never left him, and figures produced with toy manufacturers carry his patterning onto a moulded three dimensional form. These are manufactured objects in coloured editions, and they should be valued as designer toys with an artist's surface rather than as sculpture. For any of these the questions that matter are the format, whether the piece is genuinely glazed ceramic or a painted imitation of it, the edition size and number, whether the original box and paperwork survive, and the condition of the surface, since chipped glaze and scuffed vinyl both cost real money.