Manolo Gamboa Naon, known as Manoloide, is an Argentine artist who writes code, mostly in Processing, to build compositions where color, repeating geometric and organic forms, and deliberate errors are treated as raw material.Errors are central to the practice, in the artist's words: “The beginning is errors, errors, errors, errors. They are beautiful errors.”
A 2018 profile by Artnome described the work as “the result of the entire contents of twentieth-century art and design being put into a blender.” In 2019 Gamboa Naon moved to Germany to work at a favorite studio in Berlin, then returned to Argentina the following year as the COVID-19 pandemic began. The isolation brought on a depression, and Gamboa Naon stopped coding for months, closed social media accounts, and turned to reading, piano and drawing before returning to the computer. A Feral File exhibition that followed resulted in uneasy dream, described as the hardest piece Gamboa Naon had made, worked on for weeks without sleep.The 2019 work Inside is held in Le Random's collection.
In 2021 Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich gave Gamboa Naon a solo show, 88 Allegories, 88 individual works that combine into a single canvas built from flowers, color, number and shape.The Last Flowers series from the same year pulls floral forms away from botanical accuracy into dense fields of color and geometry.For “The Game of Life”, a 2021 online tribute to mathematician John Horton Conway, Gamboa Naon layered several simultaneous runs of Conway's cellular automaton to build depth and movement into the piece, continuing an interest in cellular automata visible again in the 2022 work PPRDD, built from flow fields ordered with Perlin noise.,In 2023 the Node to Node art salon in Paris presented Gamboa Naon's work in physical form for the first time.In 2026 the long-form generative series Tecrrain became the cover artwork for the book Collecting Art Onchain, pairing each of 101 unique iterations with a numbered copy of the book.
