IsmaHelio

Artist

IsmaHelio

Raster

raster.art/artist/ismahelio ↗

Based

Born 1986, Spain. Has worked and lived in Spain, Mexico, India, China, and Hong Kong

Practice

Generative art shaped by architecture, parametric design, geometry, and controlled randomness

In the set

Invisibles ↗ · 200 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

IsmaHelio, also identified as Ismael Sanz, approaches generative art through architectural training. An auction catalogue describes him as a Spanish architect born in 1986 who specializes in parametric and generative design.¹ The Generative Art Museum records that he has worked and lived across Spain, Mexico, India, China, and Hong Kong, experiences it connects to the cultural formation of his practice.² His images translate spatial thinking into dense two-dimensional projections. Lines, blocks, planes, and perspectival cues suggest structures that might be buildings, maps, machines, or fragments of cities.

This ambiguity is central. IsmaHelio does not use code merely to automate a recognizable architectural style. Instead, he builds systems in which order and contingency remain visibly entangled. His documented interests include automated detail, chaos held within boundaries, semi-controlled randomness, and the representation of three-dimensional forms as two-dimensional drawings.² The museum’s exhibition brochure similarly describes a practice grounded in computational design, geometry, latent spaces, and highly complex coded illustration.³

Architecture as a generative language

The artist’s architectural vocabulary emerged through early blockchain projects on Tezos. A project essay reports that he began using JavaScript and p5.js in 2021 to control a personal library of three-dimensional objects, perspectives, intersections, and block projections.⁴ That account identifies Helio World as an early fx(hash) release and describes Wandering Line and BAI as important precedents. The former introduced an agent moving through three-dimensional space, while the latter evoked urban plans without resolving into literal representations.⁴

Institutional presentation accompanied this development. The Generative Art Museum’s history records IsmaHelio alongside Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez and Synesthesia in its first exhibition, For the love of art, which opened in December 2021.⁵ The exhibition brochure characterizes his compositions as geometric structures holding chaos and randomness within defined limits.³ A 2022 account of NFT Show Europe also places him within a live generative-art program involving artists and an fx(hash) minting experience.⁶ These contexts position his work within a wider discussion of algorithms as creative systems rather than neutral production tools.

Invisible cities, visible systems

Invisibles brings these concerns to the scale of the metropolis. Released through Art Blocks Presents in 200 editions, the project draws on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Hong Kong, where the artist lived for nine years.⁷ Contemporary release coverage emphasized the source novel’s algorithmic qualities and the project’s movement among imagined lands, cultural encounter, reality, and fiction.⁷ A collection record independently confirms a supply of 200 works and identifies the series as part of Art Blocks.⁸

The compositions do not illustrate particular buildings. Instead, they gather architectural signs into intricate, impossible wholes. Repeated blocks imply density, lines establish routes and edges, and layered projections frustrate any stable distinction between elevation, plan, and aerial view. The eye is invited to navigate rather than identify. In this sense, the city becomes both subject and method: a rule-bound accumulation whose local details remain intelligible even when the total structure exceeds immediate comprehension.

Live on Art Blocks: invisibles-by-ismahelio ↗

From screen to spatial imagination

The series’ exhibition life clarifies its spatial character. Responsive Dreams presented works titled Invisibles: Eufemia and Invisibles: Isidora alongside BAI and the collaborative Proxima in its Local Art Wall.⁹ The festival’s broader presentation also lists IsmaHelio among its participating artists, situating these works within an exhibition devoted to generative art as creative expression.¹⁰ Across such appearances, his output reads less as a catalogue of fixed objects than as a family of systems for considering how structures accumulate, intersect, and become legible.

His later Bitcoin project, The Machine, extends that inquiry through a JavaScript algorithm that combines blocks and cubes into projected three-dimensional compositions.⁴ Its restricted colors, proportional relationships, and architectural projections make the continuity with Invisibles explicit. Both projects treat the image as a site where construction and interpretation occur together. The viewer encounters a rigorously bounded system, yet cities, sculptures, machinery, and rooms remain available as perceptual possibilities.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the IsmaHelio links page ↗.