Vasco Marçal Grilo is a Lisbon-born artist whose practice spans photography, collage, and digital/AI-driven image-making. Trained as an engineer, with degrees from IST Lisbon, Lehigh University, and an MBA from Bocconi, he blends a technical mindset with a strong visual and emotional sensitivity. His work explores the human body, memory, and the subconscious, drawing on influences from Surrealism, Dada, and European comic aesthetics. Grilo works between Lisbon and Milan, developing a visual language that merges traditional techniques with contemporary algorithms. His pieces have been featured on platforms such as Saatchi Art and Artsy, and he has exhibited internationally in group and solo shows. At the core of his practice is an interest in how images—real or generated—can reveal inner states and reshape our perception of reality.
Your background in engineering and technology is quite unique for an artist—how does this technical training influence the way you approach image-making?
I guess I tend to approach work in a very methodic and structured way. My ideas and imagination are all over the place but my ability to get the work done heavily depends on properly managing my process workflows and to be very agile with the different technologies and algorithms I work with. In short, my technical and business background helps to structure my natural chaotic tendencies.
Your work often explores the body, memory, and the subconscious. What draws you to these themes, and how do they shape the stories you build in your images?
I grew up submerged in European comics and authors such as Moebius, Bilal, Manara, Boucq and many others that in the 70´s and 80´s heavily explored these themes. And in a way all human stories have to do with our bodies, our memories, and the subconscious unknowns around us that shape our relationships with other humans and nature. Hence it´s just natural that my work lives in that space too.
You move fluidly between photography, collage, and AI-driven processes. How do you decide which medium best suits a particular idea?
I don´t. It´s now all one and the same.
Working between Lisbon and Milan, how do these two environments influence your visual language and the atmosphere of your work?
Since my early 20´s and for a period of 30 years, I´ve lived in five different countries for some extended periods of time. I guess all that diversity must have had an influence on my ways of looking and thinking about the world and potentially that is reflected on my creative output. You tell me!
As someone who blends traditional methods with algorithms, how do you see AI transforming the future of art, and where do you feel the human touch remains essential?
What I´m interested in is how AI can change the present of art right now because it is now that I can use it to express myself. At the same time the so called “human touch” will remain essential only as far as we´re able to perceive it (which hopefully we always will). I guess humans, with our natural empathic tendencies (most of us anyway) will continue to ensure that art doesn´t just exist but that art ultimately matters. Fear not, machines will not take us!
