[3] However, as art historian Paul J. Karlstrom wrote, "Despite a year as a scholarship student at CSFA, Valledor was largely self-taught, but he was gifted and quickly developed a gestural abstract style reflecting the influence of Mark Tobey.
[citation needed] In addition to Tobey, his earliest influences were Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, and Bradley Walker Tomlin.
"[5] When he moved to New York City in 1961 he became a member of the influential Park Place Gallery in SoHo, further delving into his avant garde interests of minimalism and conceptualism.
It was considered the first gallery in SoHo, and included artists like Edwin Ruda, Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, and Forrest Myers.
Colpitt states, "Less assimilable to Op art experiments of the early 1960s, Valledor's shaped canvases are more reminiscent of Frank Stella's contemporaneous work...
But Skeedo (1965) is so quirky and radically shaped that it seems without precedent..."[12] Art critic Knute Stiles reviewed Valledor's shows in San Francisco in the 1976: "He is one of a dozen modernists who subscribe to one or another of the subgroups of what might be called International Style Geometric abstraction.
"[13] Valledor's work explores the juxtapositions of colors and geometric forms as metaphors for the interplay of elements in the natural world, as Lawrence Rinder explains:We all know that at one time (especially in San Francisco) jazz, abstract expressionism and what's known as Beat poetry were all part of one culture.
Abandoning the gestural language of abstract expressionism (which would linger in the Bay Area for decades), he started to explore reduced palettes, geometric shapes, and the spatial dimension of color.