Roberto Antelo breaks into the national and international art scene through the swift and decisive gesture with which he takes his photographs, marked by precision and minimalism. Nothing appears superfluous within the Maestro’s frames, as he turns to photography as an unparalleled medium for capturing fleeting moments of life that might otherwise go unnoticed, imbuing them with a lyrical sense that contrasts with the apparent banality of everyday life. His art becomes a voice for an aesthetic initially promoted by street photography—a genre that captures subjects in spontaneous, real-life situations and public spaces, highlighting how specific aspects of society are reflected in daily life.
Starting from these premises, Antelo composes images quickly, intuitively selecting the perfect moment to crystallize on film, giving life to rarefied scenes articulated through the strict use of black and white and analog techniques. In Antelo’s shots, the human figure loses its contours, blending with the surrounding environment and creating a sense of depersonalization. This recalls the origins of photography, evoking the magnificent compositions of Eugène Atget—father of street photography—and Henri Cartier-Bresson. While Atget and Cartier-Bresson favored Paris—with its architecture, staircases, gardens, and windows—Antelo also engages with the landscape of the French capital, considered the birthplace of the genre. With the series Paris, France (2015), he created a cycle of four photographs dedicated to the city’s vast open spaces.
The urban landscape is depicted in a way that highlights diagonal and orthogonal lines, with an expressive style that recalls Surrealism. The oblique angles in his shots reveal Antelo’s attention to the viewer’s gaze, directing it toward the center of the image and the origin of the movement animating it.
The Paris series is part of a broader body of work dedicated to cities that hold particular significance for Antelo—among them, Montevideo, his birthplace. The Uruguayan capital is captured in an unusual way, with the artist sketching its contours through emotional shots that frame fragments of landscapes not immediately recognizable but deeply meaningful. These images depict bits of streets, staircases, buildings, and beaches photographed from a moving vehicle: all elements that dissolve into the ephemeral, reshaped into a blurred and dynamic vision that redistributes form and geometry. Through these works, the urban space becomes a canvas for perceptions and interpretations first experienced by the photographer and then by the viewer, immersed in a landscape where the human figure disappears, giving way to a sense of isolation and estrangement typical of contemporary society.
The exclusion of the human figure from Antelo’s landscapes finds reconciliation in the Triptychs (2010–2015), a series of three interconnected photographs. Squares, subways, benches, and streets appear populated by moving silhouettes—some blurred, others more defined—caught in the act of performing their daily activities. The city fills with figures who, however, once again prove to be mere extras within a compositional framework aimed at visually portraying the atmosphere of incommunicability that pervades urban contexts, where the individual is just one among countless cogs in the machinery of society.
In the series Hòmo urbànus (2015), this aspect takes on a new configuration: the small human figures of the Triptychs are replaced by full-body subjects, shot at close range to make them the true protagonists of the images. In this context, the city becomes the backdrop for the "urban men" who traverse it, shaping its landscape. In one photo from the series, taken in Amsterdam in 2015, we glimpse a distinguished gentleman riding his bicycle, the most common mode of transport in the Netherlands. The spontaneity and apparent ease with which Antelo captures his subjects reaches an admirable expressive peak here, minimizing the contrast between foreground and background, both framed within a double movement that echoes the avant-garde. The subject of the photo seems to have been captured using the photodynamic technique of the Bragaglia brothers, described in the essay Futurist Photodynamism as “[…] the memory of the dynamic sensation of movement and its scientifically faithful silhouette, even in its dematerialization […]”. And it is precisely this dematerialization—this pronounced atomism or disaggregation of the body—that profoundly marks Antelo’s aesthetic conception, relegating realism to a hermeneutic category and exploring the boundaries of metaphysics, until he finds, in the space of an instant, the scene to immortalize: a human being in motion and the city’s dynamism surrounding them.
