Rogelio Polesello

Rogelio Polesello was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1939. He studied art at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and in 1958 graduated from the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts as a professor of engraving, drawing, and painting. During this period, Polesello worked in advertising.

Polesello’s artistic practice centered on perception and optical instability, interests he associated with early childhood experiences of looking through glass and improvised lenses. As geometric abstraction gained prominence in Argentina during the late 1950s and 1960s, he developed paintings and prints structured through repetition, contrast, and color relationships that disrupted fixed visual form. During the 1960s, he expanded this approach through acrylic works, including three-dimensional pieces that introduced magnification and physical distortion, directly engaging the viewer’s position and movement. In 1969, Polesello became involved with the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires, an interdisciplinary collective active between 1969 and 1973 that brought together artists, programmers, engineers, and systems analysts to work with early computer technologies. The group collaborated with IBM and university computer scientists and developed through exchanges with international counterparts such as Japan’s Computer Technique Group. Polesello produced a series of computer-assisted screenprints during his participation in the group, focused on geometry, depth, and optical effects.

By the early 1960s, Polesello’s work was being exhibited in major international venues, including the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. in 1961, the Paris Biennial in 1963, and the São Paulo Biennial in 1965. In August 1969, screenprints produced in connection with the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires were included in one of the first exhibitions of computer art in Argentina, organized by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación at Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires. Works associated with the group later circulated in Europe and North America, including Creative Computers, organized by the Computer Arts Society in the United Kingdom in 1971–72, and Tendencies 5 at the Technical Museum in Zagreb in 1973. Over the course of his career, Polesello received multiple distinctions, including two Konex Awards. His work entered the collections of institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Polesello passed away in 2014.