Add Fuel: artist profile, azulejo patterns and public art

Add Fuel is the artistic name of Portuguese artist Diogo Machado, born in Cascais. His work reinterprets the azulejo, the decorated ceramic tile closely associated with Portuguese architecture, through a contemporary vocabulary of repeated patterns and layered surfaces. Cartoons, video games, skateboarding and punk culture also inform his imagery. His official biography dates his sustained exploration of azulejos to 2008.

Pattern, illusion and cultural reference

Machado uses symmetry and repetition to establish a familiar decorative order, then complicates it with illustration and the suggestion of one surface opening onto another. Trompe-l’œil and overlapping patterns reward close viewing, revealing playful drawing within the ornament. The work spans small tile panels, murals, ceramic installations, sculptures and editions, allowing the same visual language to operate at very different scales. Practice and media.

His exhibition history includes the National Tile Museum in Lisbon, as well as galleries associated with contemporary urban art. The azulejo supplies a cultural reference for newly authored compositions. Exhibition history.

Collaboration as a meeting of visual languages

The partnership with Shepard Fairey makes that approach particularly clear. Modular, released in 2022, was followed by Frequency in 2026. In the artists’ published account of Frequency, Machado explains that he reworked motifs from Fairey’s imagery into a shared composition. Fairey describes their combination of graphic motifs, Portuguese tile references and illustration, with layers and apparent tears bringing the two approaches together.

These collaborations provide a useful comparison with Machado’s independent work. The patterned field remains important even as the source imagery changes. Looking at which elements repeat and which belong to the collaborator helps explain the composition more precisely than treating it simply as a work carrying two signatures.

A visual language across different objects

Add Fuel’s own production records also demonstrate why a recurring image does not identify a single format. The Answer appears as a screenprint on paper and as AZ500, a ceramic work on a PVC mount. Their shared title connects the imagery, while the support changes how the work occupies a room and how its signature and numbering are recorded.

For collectors, that movement between image and material is a productive way into the practice. Follow the composition across paper, ceramic and public scale, but retain each object’s individual production identity. The studio edition archive provides a historical map of print projects and publishing relationships alongside the broader account of his public and sculptural work.

Profile artwork: detail of Tem Sempre Encanto, Coimbra, 2013, by Diogo Machado (Add Fuel). This is the Commons-generated preview still from the artist-attributed video, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. The full-frame preview is a video-still derivative; Release Radar made no further changes. It represents the artist’s work and is not a portrait.