•Amours nécessaires • Photography exhibition

As part of PARIS PHOTO, the Galerie Loft is hosting an exhibition by the Argentine artist Gustavo Urruty.

Exhibition dates: November 4-16, 2019

Opening reception: Monday, November 4, from 6 p.m.

With the participation of Jean-Gabriel Mitterand

Curator for the photographs: Chantal Soler

When he travels the world, driven by what he calls his “Ulysses Complex”, Gustavo Urruty leads a double life: professional and dazzling in front of the camera, he becomes most discreet behind it.

During his competition wanderings in the 1990s, Gustavo never parted from his Leica, a camera recommended to him by the great Argentine photographer Aldo Sessa, whom he occasionally assisted while studying literature and art history in Buenos Aires. Sessa taught him to choose his light as carefully as his subjects.

At the time, this fashion vagabond walking runways and posing in every direction turned his gaze toward a desirable world, still almost untouched on the eve of the twenty-first century. With a half-smile, he recalls: “Photography saved me from the existential anxiety of being a model. When the whole world is courting you, and you live day to day in solitude”. His infatuations, translated into cherished images, accompany a deeply private life, as the condition of being in love, awakened by a variety of reasons, was necessary for his falsely detached Latin lover shots. From his native Argentina, he takes only the lovers he refrains from disturbing on the benches of public gardens, next to a monumental and deserted English Tower.

From Venice to Paris, romance appears in filigree within the muted tones of the love notes he addresses to these places, immutable in their romanticism. But when he drifts near the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, it is to rediscover the torrid echoes of a “Last Tango”.

In Rome, it is an anonymous visitor who approaches the gardens of the Villa Medici before slipping closer to the lovers of the Capitoline Hill, almost brushing the marble on which they are.

He photographs fleeting encounters like escapes from familiar settings: Proustian crumpled sheets in Cabourg and a room overlooking the English Channel; friendly moments in old Ibiza, which was for a time his “second homeland”, fisherman tossed about at the other end of the world in Hong Kong Bay.

From above, he watches a street in an upscale Parisian neighborhood where couples pass one another, dreaming of quartets, while his New York effigies are public skyscrapers, carved out of stone and light.

With fitting discretion, Gustavo Urruty experienced and shared an irresistible emotion in the face of these places that seem to come toward his lens… like necessary loves, essential to his work as an artist.