Juan Pedro Vallejo

Raster

raster.art/artist/juan-pedro-vallejo ↗

Practice

Generative systems, code, moving images, prints, and geometric studies informed by kinetic art and color theory

In the set

Interferences ↗ · 256 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Juan Pedro Vallejo is an Argentine artist whose practice joins computational procedures to the perceptual concerns of kinetic and Op art. He studied audiovisual art and initially used programming to make real-time images, developing a tool called Fragma in openFrameworks. A retrospective devoted to Julio Le Parc later prompted him to recognize that the serial rules of mid-century kinetic art could be understood as algorithmic systems, even when their permutations had been executed by hand.¹ This encounter helped orient his work toward movement, optical uncertainty, and the relative behavior of color.

Vallejo describes experience, rather than symbolic interpretation, as a central concern. His term “Pure Visibility” names an effort to approach an artwork through what shapes, colors, vibrations, and movements do to perception.¹ Le Random similarly characterizes his practice through dynamic motion, color theory, geometry, and the treatment of the screen as a material whose possible states can be sculpted.²

Instability within the circle

Interferences was released through Art Blocks on September 30, 2022, as a collection of 256 unique editions.³ Its basic operation begins with a circle, conventionally read as a stable and complete form, then cuts, opens, displaces, and repeats it. Vallejo explains that these interruptions generate visual instability: the eye encounters a figure that remains legible while its segments appear to shift, expand, or resist alignment.⁴ The resulting compositions can be spare and centralized or extend across the full field as stripes, wedges, gradients, and nested rhythms.

The project contains several families of output, including Classic, Stellar, Dynamic, Expanded, and Pixela. Their differences arise from controlled combinations of cuts, angles, apertures, subdivisions, shadows, glows, and surface treatments.⁴ These are not merely decorative traits. They establish varying degrees of spatial tension, from the compact emblem of a divided disc to compositions that make the whole screen operate as an optical field.

Live on Art Blocks: interferences-by-juan-pedro-vallejo ↗

Color as an event

Color is the project’s principal structural material. Vallejo begins with ordered selections from red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white, then generates intermediate steps to form twenty-color sequences. Rules determine how these sequences alternate with fixed colors or grayscale values.⁴ A tone consequently changes according to its neighbors, background, interval, and position. Drawing on Le Parc and Josef Albers, Vallejo treats color as relative and temporal, something perceived through interaction rather than isolated as a stable swatch.¹

This method places Interferences in conversation with Latin American kinetic art without simply reproducing its appearance. Code allows a rule to become a large family of related outcomes, while the animated screen intensifies effects once produced through painted sequences, reflective materials, or moving structures. Peripheral vision can make chromatic bands seem to advance or recede, and repeated divisions produce pulses that appear to exceed the static geometry.⁴

Vallejo’s broader activity confirms that this inquiry moves between digital and physical situations. Bright Moments’ artist archive identifies Interferences as his first long-form project and records his account of working through systems, patterns, color, form, vibration, and movement.⁵ For Bright Moments Buenos Aires in 2023, Subtraction, Reconfiguration again used points, lines, elemental geometries, and subtractive color, extending his interest in displacement into intersecting squares and circles.⁶ His academic writing with Eva Noriega also examines software-based audiovisual work, real-time parameter changes, loops, and interaction, locating these concerns within a longer investigation of software as an artistic medium.⁷

Recent documentation of Please Respond 6 shows the continuity of this economy. Vallejo describes reducing an inherited algorithmic grid to primitive forms, restricted color, optical disturbance, and a planetary composition, while relating that digital decision-making to plotter and silkscreen work in the studio.⁸ Across these contexts, his contribution lies in making the algorithm perceptible as rhythm. The system is not concealed behind the image. It is registered through repetition, interruption, and chromatic change, giving each output the character of one temporary configuration within a larger field of possibilities.

Bibliography

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