“I’m pretty smart about dressing,” says the homeowner. He is wearing a shirt with paint stains, jeans and sneakers. Of course he is not just any “linyera”. He is a renowned antique dealer and collector.
The talk takes place at his house, on the ground floor of Acassuso, very close to the river. On that property, which occupies almost the entire block, there is also a hotel with fourteen apartments and a recovery workshop. The most diverse objects abound everywhere.
Gabriel del Campo specializes in antiques, furniture, design, classic cars, motorcycles and vintage clothing. It has two antique stores (Bethlem 427, San Telmo, and Libertad 1214, Recoleta); the restaurant and food bar Naples (Caseros 449, San Telmo)where a number of objects are also exhibited; a 3,000-meter art gallery, on the same boulevard, opening soon; the Red Baron clothing brand and a car workshop in the northern area.
Along the way he studied Philosophy and Letters, Business Administration, Architecture, Cinema and Law twice. He was married four times and has four children and four grandchildren.
“I established an almost sick bond with objects and beauty, to the point of not measuring values. I have the obligation as a merchant to be governed by some differences that allow me to be efficient. I lose that direction when I see something and I want it, I want it. I don’t know if I choose the objects or the objects choose me. But a deep bond is generated for me that is inevitable,” he says.
News: How did this inevitable search begin?
Gabriel del Campo: From a very young age. I locked myself in a very old house where I lived with my grandmother. I spent hours in the attics with the door closed, almost in the dark, looking at old photos and everything that was there, from my great-grandmother’s wedding dress to my old man’s toys.
News: When did you decide to be an antique dealer?
From the Field: Because of this drive I had, I made a series of normal businesses fail, what I made I put into things that I liked. At one point I understood that there must be some grace in the universe towards me for not taking care of the money. The only way I could keep buying was if I bought and sold. That’s how I started.
News: Where are you looking?
From the Field: I enjoy looking in the non-obvious places. I can go, and I also go, to good auctions and find good and tasteful things. But I like to find objects out of context. I’m not a museum-visiting guy, for example. Beauty without possession is not what moves me the most.
News: You have to possess beauty.
From the Field: Yes, that sounds perverted, I mean I need to get up and see it. That’s why I buy it.
News: What are those non-obvious places?
From the Field: Europe has three million visited, known places, antique dealer centers. Then they have, for example, an auction called Drouot, in Paris, where they rent the rooms to people from the towns and auction off five floors at a time. I run like a madman from one floor to another, looking for the lot I like. I have more fun finding things at a street fair or a small fair than at a good antique store.
News: And here?
From the Field: Same here. I can go to visit the El Olimpo fair in Puente La Noria and I have the same intensity of search as in a spectacular auction.
News: You say that you have devotion, passion and fascination for the irrecoverable, objects and people.
From the Field: What makes something unrecoverable has nothing to do with the essence, it has to do with the state. If the essence is not recoverable, we are lost. Now, if what determines something valuable is the condition, I buy what is broken, even if it has no value.
News: And in the case of people?
From the Field: I am fascinated by the irrecoverable with values. You saw that there are guys who go from failure to failure, but they have deep human values, I love those. The same thing happens to me with statues without arms or sculptures without heads.
News: What value do you place on failure and success?
From the Field: They say that success and failure are the same impostor with a different mask. In short, it always depends on the external view.
News: It speaks a lot about beauty. What is it?
From the Field: I’m trying to learn that beauty is not just the proportions, the texture or the technical quality of what someone has made. It is also the emotion that something provokes. There is beauty in the inexplicable, in the easy, in everything. I am more interested in hidden beauty. The obvious one doesn’t drive me crazy either.
News: What excites you?
From the Field: I say that I am a woman imprisoned in a man’s body. For example, I have vintage clothing and it seems to me that men should have the right to be more adorned, like the Indians or the Vikings were. It is a right that we lost, we became much more classic. I really like old brands, I’m a fan of Pucci, I find it disruptive, fun. The ’60s were a great time, the tanos at that time combined design, modernity and a glorious past. When I find a women’s dress I like, I try it on the hanger to see how it would look.
News: So what it means is that it has a feminine sensibility.
From the Field: More or less. I have a feminine look but a very masculine handling of scale and proportion. In the places around me everything is big. I could never be an antique dealer who had display cases with things, for example. Disproportion also seems to me to be a challenge to generate beauty.
News: What pearls do you have in your collection?
From the Field: I’ll tell you the latest. There are cars and objects that transmit something related to a glorious past, with things that are no longer interesting, that although they have a dose of luxury, it is a more ascetic luxury than the luxury of now. I found and bought the Rolls-Royce that belonged to Macoco Álzaga from the year ’39 and I am leaving it with its torn, worn upholstery, but everything functional and with everything in its place. The car conveys to me what the life of its owner was like, an absolutely incredible character. He had a nightclub called El Morocco in New York and he was a lover of Rita Hayworth, for example. In fact, he spent a fortune of thousands and thousands of hectares in the province of Buenos Aires, making that life. I see the car opaque, broken, with the tires deflated and it continues to transmit to me its past glory.
News: He has a passion for classic cars
From the Field: Yes, the change in the world is making luxurious cars vulgar. Today a luxury car is bought by a Russian millionaire, a basketball player, a rapper. Before that was linked to a more specific look. Luxury became something available to anyone who had the money to pay for it.
News: What models do you have?
From the Field: I really like racing cars. Speed is one of the things that human beings aspire to without any sense. I buy them broken and recovering them is also a healing process for me and for the guys who work with me in the workshop. In principle, I buy for myself, but if a buyer appears, I sell them. I have Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, Bentley. The ones I like the most are the Italian ones from the ’50s: Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Cisitalia.
News: What does your Red Baron brand talk about?
From the Field: I hate new clothes. In fact, I’m pretty neat when it comes to dressing. My friends give me their new leather jackets so I can wear them for two or three months, wear them out, break them. I wear and tear clothes. At Red Baron we have vintage women’s and men’s clothing. A lot of Levi’s from the ’70s, a lot of Texan boots, things that make someone who wears that different. It is exhibited in Naples, the bar. What I enjoy is taking the best from each era of fashion and mixing and using it. I trust a lot in mixing, also antiques.
News: Do economic crises impact the antiques market?
From the Field: Beyond the crises of each country, particularly in this business, clients are running out. Those who are forty and under are not interested in much of the world of antiques. A good oriental rug, a Murano glass chandelier, a piece of Italian Renaissance furniture interests them zero. So prices go down and houses have a smaller and smaller percentage of antiques. Yes, I still like the design of the fifties, sixties and seventies.
News: Happiness is…?
From the Field: The workshop…
News: The workshop?
From the Field: Yes, where we recover the objects, with people who don’t understand the story too much or everything that we put into it from a more complicated head and simply sand or devotedly fix something that is broken. It also applies to cars. That feeling of the human being repairing what is broken seems moving to me.
News: He was married four times. Do you still believe in love?
From the Field: Yes, those who don’t believe in love are the ladies I meet. I still believe, I am an absolute defender of that.
News: A phrase you like?
From the Field: One that my grandmother said. “There is nothing worse than a useless person with initiative.”
