Rinascimento

In Villar Rojas’ work, the ruin cohabits with the asteroid, archaeology with the apocalypse; all as a prehistoric beast is elevated to the rank of statue and Kurt Cobain to that of a fossil.

The “Rinascimento” exhibition is steeped in a growing and mysterious sense of coldness and not because the artist – the young Argentinian Adrián Villar Rojas – switched off the heating and lights, leaving room attendant and visitors to grow numb in the Turin winter, developing the facial expression of forgotten beings, like the birds on Arctic beaches left with nothing but shafts stripped of their last feathers.

View of the exhibition “Rinascimento” by Adrián Villar Rojas at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin

This exhibition bears the mark of denudation and a progressive exposure that primarily invests the blubber – the whole pleasing and suffocating caravanserai of compulsory standard and promotional information: posters, signs, press release – that every exhibition naturally brings with it. Having lost its visual signage, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo seems to have an unusual pallor, like lips turned white by the cold. Visitors lose themselves along walls adorned only with plaster as they search for the ticket office or a toilet, their heads hunched into their shoulders, hands in coat pockets or squeezed beneath armpits and eyes squinting to sharpen their sight – assisted only by the occasional glimmers of light that trickle through openings in the ceiling at the due times. This exfoliating treatment worked by Villar Rojas inside and outside the museum – the Lecce stone skin of which has been scraped, polished and returned in its outward appearance to the original walls straightened by the architect Claudio Silvestrin in 2002 – is anything but a superficial cosmetic exercise.

A déshabillé cipher distinguishes those who – in the twilight of the vestibule – recognise themselves in the clumps of garments scattered all around. You look carefully and eventually realise what they are. A russet fox-fur languishes on the floor beside a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes – and you imagine an indistinct female figure, stout and high-ranking. An eco-leather belt is wound around an elegant wristwatch – and the image of a man with fine bones and an aquiline nose springs to mind. Here a scrap of tweed and a lace collar; there a boiled-wool sash and an umbrella. Beads of an identity shaken off, circumfused with impenetrable reserve that will one day become the focus of archaeological study.

“It’s like taking your hat off on the landing or hanging a jacket up in the hall”, explains the young room attendant, streetwise and keen to be interrogated on the meaning of those remains of who-knows-who and of all descent and extraction. “The artist wants visitors to reach the heart of the exhibition bare”, she remarks in a low voice, inviting us to turn our eyes towards, oh gosh, an unimaginable expanse of a hundred huge volcanic rocks and pieces of marble and petrified wood, all dark and guarded, that Villar Rojas came across in an Istanbul depot and has arranged in the unadorned premises of the Fondazione Sandretto. Orphans of all landscapes, the stillness and seeming unchangeability that hangs over these gigantic rocks suggest a time stood still and distant.

You stand gazing at them in dumb amazement and have to get very close before you realise that the top of every stone or piece of marble and wood harbours the carcass of a feathered creature, a shrivelled head of cabbage, a tangle of seaweed, a rotten tomato, a sea sponge, a melon or a pumpkin past its time and putrescent. Also lying on these incontinent beds – some throwing up foam and malodorous effluents – are useless bits of bric-a-brac (purchased by the artist at Turin’s Balon, a famous flea market): a pearl brooch, a set of deer antlers and a glistening emerald carafe. Deposited like shipwreck flotsam on the rocks, these sodden still-lifes ooze all the contingencies of their times. Worn out, corroded and deprived of all their grandeur.

“This artichoke was big and green”, the chatty room attendant discloses to visitors, sitting herself on a large olive-coloured stone and brandishing what must have looked very different a few days earlier, like a bulging cardoon ready to be dipped in oil. “Now, see, it’s dark and shrivelled”, she pontificates mercilessly. “This The Day After kind of spectacle is a constant in the artist’s work.” To those who ask her what lies behind the title “Rinascimento”, she replies: “Initially, the title was to refer to Satanic verses but, one day, while they were installing the exhibition, one of Adrian’s assistants saw a plant sprouting out of a stone and said: ‘It’s like a Renaissance’…” To be honest, I have read other explanations for it but this is certainly the most appealing.

A photograph shows Adrián Villar Rojas posing, full figure and compunctious looking, in the centre of the Fondazione Sandretto. All around is a lunar expanse of antediluvian stones, embellished with all forms of forage life, that becomes blurred and evasive, like a memory submerged. He is wearing a Star Wars T-shirt (and your ears hear the start to every film in the saga, with its sombre but liquid echo: “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… “). In the end, this detail, totally insignificant save for the fact that it is inscribed in a primordial-like scene, catalyses your attention on an aspect that dictates law in the artist’s poetic: the work is set free and vacillates in a sclerotic, delayed or breathless time dimension, overflowing from its bed as if eager for metamorphosis.

Burning from final-stage fever, Villar Rojas’ work dissipates the time of its substance, revealing its cracks – these mammoth alien sculptures are mostly made from mud and clay and are often cracked. The ruin cohabits with the asteroid, archaeology with the apocalypse and a shell with a SIM card – all as a prehistoric beast is elevated to the rank of statue and Kurt Cobain to that of a fossil. So, “Rinascimento” opens an abyss between the rock’s long fermentation and the frenetic life of a sea horse. Yet, they suffer the same destiny. The stone, too, becomes damaged, by lethargic and wearing erosion, while cosmic parasites proliferate on the cabbage. In the end, only a distant warmth will remain of one and the other.

until 28 February 2016
Rinascimento. Adrián Villar Rojas
Curator: Irene Calderoni
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
via Modane 16, Turin

Rinascimento

In Villar Rojas’ work, the ruin cohabits with the asteroid, archaeology with the apocalypse; all as a prehistoric beast is elevated to the rank of statue and Kurt Cobain to that of a fossil.

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