Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal
Third — Nuno Príncipe Palhas, born in Vila Nova de Gaia in 1979 — is a Portuguese muralist who came up through hip-hop culture and has been painting walls since 1996, and who never quite left graffiti's discipline behind. His walls set a carefully modelled face or object against flat geometric fields, so that a portrait resolves out of pattern the way a tile panel resolves out of repetition. The interest is in texture and the illusion of depth: paint that reads as metal, glass or brass at fifteen metres.
He signs -THIRD-RUA-, and works in illustration as well as on walls.
In Covilhã he painted Coração for WOOL 2017 — an anatomical heart grown into a pocket watch and a train of loom gears, industry as circulation. In Lisbon, for MURO 2019, he gave the whole of Rua Maria Alice, in Lumiar, over to the fado singer it is named after — seven pieces across seven buildings. In Porto, on Rua do Campo Alegre, a woman's face sits inside blue-and-orange geometry that could be snowflakes or azulejos: his panel of Para Agustina, the thirteen-artist wall curated by Frederico Draw for the Agustina Bessa-Luís centenary, painted over in June 2025.
Third's panel in "Para Agustina — Extravagante Retrato de Família", the 120-metre collective mural that ran the length of the CCDR-NORTE wall on Via Panorâmica Edgar Cardoso, between the entrance to the Faculdade de Letras and the corner of Rua do Campo Alegre. Thirteen artists from the north of Portugal, curated by Frederico Draw, each took a title from Agustina Bessa-Luís for the centenary of her birth; the wall was inaugurated in November 2022. Third's stretch is a woman's face, modelled with his usual attention to light, set into a field of blue and orange geometry that reads as snowflake or as azulejo depending on how far back you stand, with horsemen riding through the pattern on either side of her — Fanny Owen, the novel of a doomed love and a horseman, in his own language. It sits beside Pedro Podre's panel on the same wall.
Painted over
Seven pieces spread across the buildings of Rua Maria Alice and round into Rua Pedro de Queirós Pereira, telling the life of the fadista the street is named after — Glória Mendes Leal de Carvalho, born in Paião in 1904, the first Portuguese singer to record a disc and the first voice the country knew from the radio. Her portrait, episodes from her career and references to her recordings run building to building, so the whole street reads as one work; she died in Lumiar, and the street has carried her name since 2000. Painted for MURO — Festival de Arte Urbana de Lisboa in May 2019, whose theme that year was music: the musician Tó Trips answered the seven buildings with seven acoustic panels, so the street could be heard as well as read.
Condition unknown
A human heart grown into a gold pocket watch and a train of loom gears, painted across a gable on Rua Capitão Alves Roçadas for WOOL 2017. In a town built on wool mills the heart is the industry and the watch face is the shift clock it beat to. Signed -THIRD-RUA-.
Good condition
Select a pin to see the details here.
Estarreja's urban art festival runs 12 to 20 September, a decade after it started. Ten artists are painting, and the town's permanent collection is already close to a hundred pieces.
Are you an artist or organizing events?
Join BeThereGo.com and reach people looking for culture around the world.
Click here for more information.
(alpha)
