GORILA SENTADO - ALPHABRUT

Greetings from the stars.

Today, Gorila Sentado is proud to announce ALPHABRUT, our newest release by Hugo Maciel, a power house artist from Portugal, arriving this February.

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Alphabrut: An Alphabet of Faces, Fragments, and Fictions

You know… I’ve been living with Alphabrut for a long time.

Long before it became a book scheduled for release this February, it existed as DM between me and Hugo on Instagram. A quiet obsession, really, that kept resurfacing in my thoughts and dreams. Faces made from letters. Letters behaving like people. An alphabet not as a tool for learning, but as a cast of characters. When Hugo gave me the OK to publish this book I was behond happy.

Alphabrut is an illustrated alphabet in which each letter corresponds to a character and its own visual and poetic universe. What emerges is not a sequence meant to be memorized, but a collection of short portraits. Somewhere between narrative and poetry, where typography, illustration, and storytelling merge into a single object.

Each letter becomes a presence. A temperament. A fragment of a life.

Hugo explains that his fascination with illustrated alphabets goes back years. It’s a territory he’ve explored repeatedly, both in personal experiments and in commercial contexts, drawn to the strange balance they offer between structure and freedom. He tells me that an alphabet is rigid by nature. 26 fixed signs and yet it invites endless reinvention. Within that constraint, imagination sharpens.

The idea of faces constructed from letters has accompanied him for a long time. In Alphabrut, that idea finally found its full form. The book embraces its status as an unconventional object, even by the standards of alphabet books, with visible influences from Edward Gorey, but also fed by a much wider constellation of references and iconography.

He also shares that what makes the project personal is not autobiography in the literal sense, but resonance. Memories, recurring themes, and graphic choices slip into the work almost without permission. Certain characters carry moods that he recognizes. Others echo places, fears, or fascinations that followed him over the years. The personal dimension appears obliquely, encoded in line, texture, rhythm, and omission.

Hugo believes that Alphabrut sits at the intersection of contemporary literature and graphic art. It’s meant for readers who enjoy short forms, poetic fragments, and visual storytelling. And at the end, for anyone who loves books as objects, not just as containers for text.

As February approaches, I’m excited (and a little nervous) to finally let this alphabet out into the world. It has lived privately between me and Hugo for long enough. Soon, the letters get to speak for themselves.

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Alphabrut: One Shot | Created: Hugo Macial | Pages: 32 black and white | Cover price: 8.00€ | Release date: February TBD

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See you all on the next post, where we will do a little interview to Hugo Maciel.

See you soon.

D.

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