Maria Carolina Baulo

viernes 30 de octubre de 2009

Adrian Villar Rojas - Ruth Benzacar Gallery

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE-USA

November, 2009

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/nov_09/nov09.shtml

Adrian Villar Rojas is an argentine artist who likes to be challenged; he doesn’t define himself as a painter or sculptor, but as an artist who wants to try it all and likes to work close to the border line; he plays the part of a director always pushing himself to the limit.
The artist constantly refers to the idea of making an archaeological installation as he pictures how the scenario of the end of the world would be like, also contemplating what might happen in hundreds of years when he’s no longer alive and all his remains, if any, still have a place in the planet. He wonders if he would be remembered, if it would be possible to reconstruct the main “moments” of his life like love, family relationships or his personal interests. The artist is deeply concern about death, time, loneliness, sadness, catastrophes and the human susceptibility to coincidences. He’s attracted to explore spaces and obsessed with the study of humans and their actions.

Villar Rojas combines impossible situations; time is the engine and not willing to let any moment slip away, he tries to capture each one of them in every ruin he creates or in the ancient fossils he mix with ordinary elements of our daily life. He makes monuments: “I make monuments because I’m not ready to loose anything”. An imaginary world becomes visible to the contemporary spectator, invited to interact within it.
Men from the Neanderthal Era, dinosaurs and all kind of animals, fantastic mutilated creatures deformed or dead, they all incarnate that world beyond human rationality where pain and destruction, but also redemption and persistence exist. Inside the space provided by the gallery Ruth Benzacar in Buenos Aires, we witness the end of the world and also the beginning of a new one. Elements co-exist in an incoherent habitat: photomontages, paints, remains of broken buildings, cars, a poor copy of Michelangelo’s David, acrylic butterflies, even a mosses with a baby’s figure in it. Chimneys built using construction material such as bricks, cement, sand and clay; water tanks made of fibro cement; enormous pieces of glass covering the floor; everything seems to play an important role in the installation but not in a dramatic way. They are all part of the surrealist landscape: “I heard someone said you could get hurt in my installation and I liked it because I thought the idea of taking a risk while entering in that place, was attractive”, said the artist.

Adrian Villar Rojas is always conscience of how compromising these kinds of projects are and how exposed he feels. He commits physically and emotionally as if that experience would be the very last one. In only 10 days he put the installation together and only the help of assistants was required when creating the enormous amount of clay sculptures, the small ones in cold china or the handcrafts disseminated all around. But more than 3 months of preproduction and preparation where dedicated to build in his mind, an entire cosmos to cover the 80 m2 of the gallery.
Prehistoric times and our present interact in a place without a real or possible existence. The ruins, the media, fantasy and reality, technology and handcrafts, life and death participate of a creative tension that nurture and neutralise each other at the same time.

Ruth Benzacar Gallery

http://www.ruthbenzacar.com/