Telmo Guerra

Telmo Guerra is a Portuguese artist born in Covilhã who settled in Switzerland in 2012 and lives in Valangin, in the canton of Neuchâtel. Since 2000 he has devoted himself to low relief engraving, a practice rooted in Portuguese ceramics that he applies to glass, wood, iron, concrete, stone and clay. On walls he works with a pneumatic hammer, carving faces out of the rendering layer by layer before picking them out with paint. His most prominent murals include the 150 m2 wall of the former Corso cinema in La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he sculpted Le Corbusier, Blaise Cendrars and Monique Saint-Hélier in 2017 for the Olá Portugal initiative, a portrait of Swiss president Robert Comtesse in Valangin, and the Saudade panel in the garden of the same name. In 2024 he presented Pope Francis with one of his engraved works.