Omar Lobato

Raster

raster.art/artist/omar-lobato ↗

Practice

Browser-based generative art focused on abstraction, texture, deterministic variation, and the visual possibilities of p5.js.

In the set

Stains on a Canvas ↗ · 300 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Omar Lobato is a programmer, digital artist, and music producer whose practice centers on generative art.¹ His development followed a route through web programming, cybersecurity, music, and sustained experimentation with creative coding.² This interdisciplinary background matters because Lobato does not use code merely to accelerate image production. Code establishes the conditions through which visual decisions are distributed across a family of related but distinct outcomes.

His work became visible within the open generative-art culture surrounding fxhash. A 2022 profile describes his use of p5.js and Hydra, his preference for abstraction, and the elaborate textures of odium.¹ The fxhash model provides a useful context for this practice: artists publish code-based generators, while collectors acquire individual outputs created through seeded variation.³ Lobato uses that framework to reconcile repetition with difference and systematic construction with surfaces that appear stained, rubbed, or weathered.

Painting after the program

Stains on a Canvas is Lobato’s AB[500] work. The official Art Blocks collection record dates its release to October 14, 2022 and identifies exactly 300 unique artworks.⁴ Its title establishes painting as both a reference and a problem. Each output resembles an accumulated field rather than a clean technical diagram, although its marks originate in a repeatable computational process. The collection asks how texture, density, overlap, and color can make an algorithmic image feel materially worked.

The series belongs to a broader history in which artists define constraints and relinquish control over particular outcomes. The Toledo Museum of Art describes generative art as the creation of systems whose rules produce multiple variations, sometimes yielding unexpected results.⁵ Curator Julia Kaganskiy further situates such work within a negotiation between chance and control, intention and emergence, and authorship and automation.⁶ Lobato’s contribution is distinguished by its attention to the image surface. Instead of foregrounding geometric order, the works allow structure to recede beneath mottled color, granular edges, and passages that evoke absorption or abrasion.

Live on Art Blocks: stains-on-a-canvas-by-omar-lobato ↗

Texture, chance, and continuity

The six examples show how a single generator can sustain a recognizable vocabulary without collapsing into a template. Color relationships shift, compositional weight migrates, and layered marks alternately cohere and disperse. The relevant unit is not only the solitary image but also the interval between outputs. Each edition clarifies what the system preserves and what it permits to change.

This balance is characteristic of deterministic generative systems. Pseudorandom processes introduce variety, while a stable seed permits a particular result to be regenerated.³ Browser-based practice also brings technical conditions. fxhash documentation identifies HTML Canvas as a principal technology for creating browser-rendered generative graphics.⁷ Its library guidance identifies p5.js as a widely used creative-coding library and requires external libraries to be bundled with a project, supporting self-contained execution.⁸

Lobato has extended this visual language across platforms. A 2024 Genify interview traces his movement from technical work and music toward the generative project Ghost.² Sotheby’s subsequently offered the unique GHOST #1 in its December 2024 Digital Art Day Auction. The catalogue describes noise algorithms and shaders used to form monochromatic corridors, structures, and ambiguous landscapes.⁹ An fxhash iteration record for Disruptor- #21 also preserves Lobato’s earlier platform authorship under the name omarlobato.¹⁰

Stains on a Canvas makes variation visible as a form of material thinking.

Within AB[500], Lobato’s 300-edition collection presents a compact argument. Code establishes the conditions, the mint identifies an output, and texture gives that output perceptual depth. The result is painting reconsidered through rules, seeds, and executable form.

Bibliography

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