Adrián Villar Rojas: _The Ruins of Time_

Villar Rojas represented Argentina in the 2011 Venice Biennale with the work El asesino de tu herencia (The murderer of your heritage), a series of sculptures in clay and concrete, his favorite materials, whose hybrid renditions of human and mechanical elements on a monumental scale explored in a stimulating way the presence of man at the intersection of parallel worlds. At the same time, he generated a very specific feeling of anguish and insignificance. His most recent exhibition at MoMA PS1, “La inocencia de los animales”/”The Innocence of Animals”, continues to articulate these concerns.

The issue of time, addressed from the perspective of the artistic imagination that constructs the environment and the world of the future, predominates in this exhibition that the museum organized in the format of a festival under the direction of the institution’s curator and director, Klaus Biesenbach. “Expo 1: New York”, the project that includes Villar Rojas’ investigation, encompasses several exhibits that address ecological challenges, the role of man in his relationship with the environment and the response of artists to these challenges through their own models for the future.

“Dark Optimism” is the idea behind the part of the project in which Adrián inserts his work. The title was taken from the editorial collective and magazine Triple Canopy – platforms that promote a vision which conceives the end of the world and the advent of a new world under the influence of technological transformation. The works exhibited here embody the ambiguity of the phrase, enunciating a perverse subject while encouraging at the same time the re-invention of utopia.

Villar Rojas’ work, The innocence of animals, is a functional sculptural installation that contains two main spaces: a staircase reminiscent of an amphitheater of antiquity, and another one, covered with debris and simulating a cave, that evokes a post-apocalyptic image. A cavity in the wall separating the two staircases visually links the two areas, but it is impossible to walk through it, since it is obstructed by the remnants of chaos.

As soon as they are finished, the pieces modeled on a monumental scale in clay and concrete become instantaneous cracked and crumbling ruins. The old-time amphitheater has a minimalist quality to it interrupted only by the presence of a fragment of a bell that seems to have been embedded in the steps by the passage of time. Likewise, the lighting design emphasizes this devastating effect: a geometrically perfect square of fluorescent lights mounted on the ceiling.

The apocalyptic world is represented by stairs filled with architectonic fragments that look like vestiges of a catastrophe. There are tubular, round, and imprecise elements, and they are all so tightly fused that it is impossible to see the center. The space is dark, somber and gloomy. If the wall dividing the past from the future did not exist, it might even be said that the future is a reflection of the past that has incorporated destruction as if it had been a broken mirror. And man is at the intersection of those multiple universes.

The intervention into the space is not only present in the transformation of the exhibition rooms hosting the installations but also in the new function they acquire within the complex. The amphitheater is the space hosting the School, a project of exchange between artists and audience to talk about the respective works. Art is not, in this case, merely the object exhibited; it is also its articulation in life as artwork, in its recently acquired meaning.

The title has an essential weight in Adrián’s works. On this occasion, The innocence of animals contains the notion that human beings are innocent, in many cases, with regard to the suffering caused by their relationships with others. Since the nature of the artist’s montages includes group work, this is one of the consequences to be endured along the way.

Adrián Villar Rojas assigns to beauty an importance that draws him closer to Romanticism tan to the irreverence of contemporary art. And although it is difficult to see in the monumentality of his pieces a feeling of intimacy that may bring him close to the human, behind the apparent coldness of chaos and destruction there is an emotional element, the wish to communicate with people, the need to bring them together. His work transcends generational issues and inscribes itself in the territory of the artist concerned with the fate of man, for whom the prelude to the end of the world is a moment of exploration, reflection, and search for solutions. Adrián is an artist who feels man’s sadness and erects monuments to exorcize it.