Portuguese artist Diogo Machado, better known as Add Fuel, visited a couple of months Sacramento, California where he painted this large-scale mural titled the ‘RODRIGUES/Z’ for the Sacramento Mural Festival.
like in the rest of his work Add Fuel introduces and reinterprets the language of the traditional Portuguese azulejo, not only to express or highlight his own Portuguese identity, but also to reflect about the significance of tradition, what it means for us and how we can preserve it in a fast paced and technologically advanced modern world, always researching fortraditional patterns from the region in which he is working.
In 1542, Portuguese-born João Rodrigues Cabrilho or Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo(his nationality is somehow disputed), was a navigator and explorer, known for being the first European explorer to navigate the coast of present-day California in the United States on behalf of the Spanish Empire. When thinking about Cabrilho Add Fuel adds: “I felt a connection. Alongside the patterned “tile work”, I felt I needed to explore this personality in this specific mural.”
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
