Screen print, Time Out cover and now a mural: Add Fuel’s tribute to Cascais

Add Fuel spends his days travelling the world, leaving his mark on walls in China, Norway, the United States, Brazil and Australia, among many others. But it all started in Cascais – and it’s in Cascais that he’s come full circle.

“Some places don’t just hold your memories… they hold a part of who you are. This is me, this is Cascais”, he wrote in the Instagram post unveiling his new mural. The piece, located opposite Praia da Conceição, reinterprets Visita – a screen print he created in 2024 for Visit Cascais, which also inspired the cover of the latest Time Out Cascais guide.

Diogo Machado, better known as Add Fuel, was born and raised in Cascais. The son of a local mother and a father from Viseu – who also made his life in the town, managing the legendary (and now closed) Bauhaus nightclub – he became known for his reinterpretation of the azulejo, that quintessentially Portuguese art form.

The signature blue and white tones remain, but his patterns are anything but traditional, blending an urban, contemporary visual language with deep national heritage. Today, his distinctive style extends beyond murals to include sculptures and other formats. This summer, in collaboration with Spanish duo PichiAvo, the artist exhibited at the Underdogs Gallery in Marvila, Lisbon. Before that, we visited his studio at DNA, Cascais’s entrepreneurship hub, where we sat down with the 44-year-old artist to talk about his journey and his enduring connection to the town he calls home.

You have lived all over Cascais, a town you know inside out. Has that connection – working on local projects – always been there, or did it grow gradually as your career developed?
I’ve always had the ambition and the drive to work abroad. At first, I wasn’t sure how my work would be perceived in countries without a tile culture – they might not get it. I really use tiles, but my designs are far from traditional. So I always had more work abroad than in Portugal, even though I grew up in Cascais. I went to secondary school at Ibn Mucana, lived in Pai do Vento, Amoreira, the town centre – where I still am... And this connection I now have with Cascais is really a reconnection. Why? Almost 20 years ago, I was invited to take part in a Cascais Jovem project that involved covering some building façades. The idea was to create something temporary – printing huge canvases to drape over some of Cascais’s most iconic buildings. I got the train station, and that’s when I first started thinking about tiles. I came from a world of illustration, with distinctive characters and a very specific style that I still develop today. But for that project, I asked myself: how can I adapt my work to something that connects me to where I am, where I feel at home? Since it was going on a wall, the link to Portuguese tiles just clicked. That’s when I created what’s now considered my “tile zero.”

So your connection to the tile really began in Cascais.
Exactly. From there, I started developing the tile aesthetic and patterns, reworking them, and went into the studio to figure out how to literally integrate my art into the tile material – embedding digital drawings into the ceramic itself. That’s how the snowball started rolling, becoming Add Fuel Studio and the body of work I’m lucky to have recognised today. And funnily enough, in 2024 I reconnected with Turismo de Cascais. They reached out for a project, and I was thrilled because, of course, I love working here – it’s home, and whenever I can, I’m happy to do it.

You’ve also taken part in Cascais’s street art festivals, like Muraliza...
Exactly, though always through third parties. This time, there was a direct collaboration – we created a screen print edition that’s been a huge success, and I’m really happy about it. It was easy for me to work on Cascais, to think about the town’s iconography and its strong link to the sea. There are elements in the print that reference the architecture of the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, the lighthouse [of Santa Marta] is there too, as well as the sun, the water, the fishing heritage – things that are ours. I also took part in the Infinito festival in Bairro da Torre, leaving another mural in Cascais. Around that time, since skating is a big part of my life, I found out about Torre Plstik, a project that makes skateboards from recycled plastic, and I thought it’d be cool to collaborate. I designed ten boards with my artwork and gave them back so they could use them for classes. It turned into a whole event – they inaugurated a mini halfpipe with one of my paintings. I really felt at home again, and I felt Cascais’s support. 2024 was the year I managed to complete the full circle – go around the world and come back home.

The blue that’s so tied to your visual identity – was that something you were already exploring before working with tiles, or did it come from there? It also connects to the sea and Cascais.
If I asked you to picture a tile, you’d probably think of blue and white. That was my intuitive starting point when I began working with this aesthetic. Since I was already changing the shapes and patterns, if I changed the colour too, it would stray too far. It comes from cobalt blue, the pigment used in the 17th century, originally from China, which became the base for our traditional Portuguese tiles – when diluted, it creates all these shades of blue, but they all stem from that same tone. Those became my colours. And funnily enough, blue is a colour I love – it conveys calm and harmony, because it comes from the sea, the sky, wide open spaces… It breathes. So it was a happy marriage between both things. I often go walking around Boca do Inferno, where the sea meets the sky, and it’s the same at Guincho… it brings peace and tranquillity – something we all need more of.

You grew up with those colours and landscapes…
Exactly – always with the sea close by, and more than 300 days of sunshine a year… so the blue comes from that. I also really enjoy changing the palette when it makes sense. For instance, when I do interventions in another country that has some tile or pattern culture, I make a point of adapting my work to the local context. After all, I’m just there to paint; I leave, and the locals live with it every day – so I want them to connect with it.

Tiles are so Portuguese, which is why you explored them in your “tile zero” at the train station. Beyond the blue you mentioned, which also comes from the sea, do you feel Cascais inspires your work?
Cascais is always the foundation of my inspiration. Growing up there, moving around town, seeing tile façades everywhere… I didn’t really see that in Lisbon the same way. Most of my experiences were in Cascais. Especially in the historic town centre, there were lots of patterned tiles on the buildings. And of course, seeing them at home – we all grew up with them, maybe not the best examples, but everyone had those slightly kitsch tiles on the walls.

You have a background in graphic design and illustration, but Cascais also has a strong graffiti history, especially around Carcavelos. Did that influence your work?
I’m glad you mention that, because it was huge. I’ve always loved drawing and art, but I really got hooked in my teens. I spent a couple of summers at Carcavelos beach, which was constantly painted over by PRM, the first graffiti crew in Portugal. Me and some friends started painting too. We had the Ibn Mucana skate park, where we could paint freely, and we did it all the time… A few years later I stopped doing graffiti because, honestly, I wasn’t very good at doing it quickly, and I didn’t want to get into trouble. But it was so important later, when I returned to muralism and painting, to feel comfortable in front of a wall with a spray can and know what I was doing. Carcavelos was where graffiti started in Portugal, and it was definitely very influential for me.

Do you have any ideas for Cascais that you haven’t realised yet?
A few things are in the works: I’d love to exhibit at the Cascais Cultural Centre – it’s my home and just 200 metres from my house. I’d also love to have a sculpture or a large tile installation in a roundabout or some public space. There’s the whole Bairro dos Museus area, which could make sense for a permanent public tile sculpture. We’ll see. I want – and make a point – to keep working with Cascais, because it’s where I feel at home.

+ A guide with plenty of colour: the best of street art in Cascais