Diamond Dust and Masked Faces: Paul Insect Ignites Lisbon

Lisbon’s autumn art calendar has acquired a sudden jolt of colour, texture and provocation. British street-art veteran Paul Insect has finally unveiled a long-promised solo show in Marvila, conjuring 22 new works that sparkle with diamond dust, throw back glitter, and stare through deliberately carved-out eyes. Visitors will find themselves juggling delight and unease: the canvases are playful at first glance, yet they whisper about surveillance, fractured identity and the perpetual tug-of-war between what we reveal and what we hide.

Why Lisbon, and why now?

When Paul Insect first walked the calçada portuguesa a few years ago, the city’s pixelated stone paths, sun-bleached azulejos and raw industrial edges felt like visual shorthand for his own practice—hand-made, repetitive, a little battered, but impossible to ignore. Lisbon’s Underdogs Gallery, founded by local street-art star Alexandre Farto (Vhils), had been courting the Londoner for nearly 20 years. The timing finally clicked in 2025, giving Insect seven uninterrupted months to conjure the material that now fills the former riverside warehouse on Rua Fernando Palha. For an expatriate community used to seeing Portugal through the lens of food, fado and beaches, the show is a reminder that the capital also trades in edgy, globally resonant art.

Inside “Broken Vision”: craft, collage and stubbornly analogue tricks

Every work in the room feels engineered for binocular vision: first you admire the high-gloss colour fields, then you detect the hand-cut photocopy fragments, the meticulous Ben Day dots, and the coarse specks of diamond dust shimmering like broken glass. Insect still refuses the shortcuts of Photoshop. Instead he layers screen-print stencils, aerosol dot-work and razor-sharp collage—techniques he learned while designing record sleeves in pre-digital London. The limited-edition prints released online on 3 September repeat that recipe on paper, hand-finished so no two sheets are identical. It is street art’s do-it-yourself ethic, retooled for the white cube.

Surveillance, fragmentation and the masks we wear

Living in London, Insect walks daily through the densest CCTV network in Europe. He answers the cameras with blank, cut-out faces that glare back at the viewer. The gallery walls teem with masked figures, splintered like a mirror after impact; a single elegant slit where the eyes should be invites intimacy while keeping you at bay. For social-media natives who scroll more than they walk, the message is blunt: we curate our own visibility, yet our data trails make us permanently watchable. The canvases compress that tension into layers of colour and shards of form, transforming the room into a hall of distorted self-portraits.

Two decades of creative friendship

Insect and Vhils met on the international street-art circuit when both were still hustling for wall space. The Portuguese sculptor went on to burrow faces into building facades around the world, while the Brit deepened his obsession with collage, puppetry and graphic satire. They stayed in touch, exchanging studio visits from Shoreditch to Setúbal, and once shared representation under Banksy’s former gallerist Steve Lazarides. That long conversation finally materialised as a concrete project when Vhils offered a prime slot in his own Lisbon gallery. The result is less a commercial alliance than a private joke made public—two veterans proving that street art’s collaborative spirit can survive the leap into institutional spaces.

Visiting details—and why expats should care

“Broken Vision” runs until 1 November 2025 at Underdogs Gallery, Tuesday to Saturday, 14:00-19:00. Entry is free, and the riverside district of Marvila is reachable in 12 minutes by train from Santa Apolónia—ideal for anyone who has grown tired of Baixa crowds. Beyond the exhibition, the neighbourhood offers craft breweries, converted warehouses and enough street murals to make a decent afternoon itinerary. Digital viewers can browse the online viewing room, but the glint of diamond dust is best experienced in person, catching whatever autumn sunlight leaks through the gallery’s loading-dock doors.

Early verdict: critics nod, public queues

Local outlets from Diário de Notícias to Time Out Lisboa have hailed the show as a “fractured reflection on modern visibility”. Art bloggers praise the “tactile seduction” of the surfaces, while Instagram feeds overflow with close-ups of glittering eyes and amused selfies beside the cut-out faces. The gallery will not release attendance figures before closing day, yet staff confirm that opening weekend foot traffic exceeded expectations, helped by September’s entrance-gratuita promotion. For now, Lisbon’s expat art lovers have a rare chance to watch a celebrated anonymity specialist hold up a cracked mirror to the city—and, by extension, to themselves.