BENELUX ISSUE 849 Jun 2021

Xavier Portela is a Belgo-Portuguese creative director, self-taught photographer and videographer currently residing in Brussels. He started his career as a web developer after he graduated from Multimedia at IAD (Diffusion Art Institute) in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. Frustrated by his daily job as a developer for an international corporation, he dropped it all to work on his own and follow his passion for images.

Since then he is known for his visual onslaught of signs and neon lights series: “Glow” which was first released during summer 2016. Glow is a collection of cities captured at night where the colours try to activate the brain in order to reproduce the variables you don't have in a photo, such as the temperature, noise and motion. Like painters who manipulate their medium in order to be able to depict spontaneity and movement in a static, two-dimensional image. Simply said, "Glow is what you remember instead of what you’ve seen."