Alejandro Vallega is an Italo-South American and U.S. Latino painter. He was born in Santiago, Chile. After fleeing with his family from the military dictatorship in Chile (1974), he lived in San Luis, Argentina, where he began his formal art studies at the age of twelve in the atelier of Argentinean photographer Luis Martin. After fleeing once again from a military dictatorship and from the “dirty war” in Argentina, he settled with his family in the United States. He studied painting and filmmaking in the BFA program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. The years of intense technical study were accompanied by an increasing interest in questions about the content and sense of art making. These questions led him to advanced academic studies. He received a BA in Liberal Arts at the “Great Books Program,” St. John’s College, an MA in philosophy from Boston University and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna, Austria.

He has written extensively on aesthetics and painting, on the way works of art and art making happen as dynamic threshold for the understanding and originary transformation of the sense of worlds and identities. His writings include four monographs, and essays on Paul Klee, Alfredo Jaar, Anselm Kiefer, and contemporary Chinese master Cao Jun, with whom he is currently collaborating on a book on painting and on a joined painting exhibition. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and continues his activities in the visual arts with a studio in Eugene, Oregon, and a studio in Milano, Italy where he lives part of the year. His visual work appears in a joined book project published in 2014 together with the American philosopher John Sallis, titled Light Traces.