Central to Adrian Villar Rojas’s practice is an ongoing project to produce site and temporal specific work that poses the questions: What can’t survive? What leaves no trace? Of a dialogue between what is organic and inorganic; human made or machine made; human and non-human. Since his time at art school in Rosario, Argentina, Rojas has questioned why the work he creates should last forever given his belief that humans as a species are entropic and degradable.
For his recent exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris titled The end of imagination he states:
"In 2010, I proposed a hypothesis: What if, in the final moments of humanity, the last of the species decided they wanted to make an artwork? It would be the last human artwork, together with all the logical implications unfolded by this fact. The end of art, end of the world and end of language are then one and the same thing: the same end. In my fabulations, reaching the shores of art created a vacuum, a silence that gave space for me to explore nonhuman perspectives. This is when I placed a new metaphor of an alien into this terminal landscape. What I call the ‘alien gaze’ expresses this impossible paradox: a subjectivity without culture."
This “alien” perspective is evident in Rojas inviting the viewer to explore his take-over of the gallery with figures, diagrams, images and a “panhuman” language based on past and present language systems, that are indecipherable yet with recognisable elements, placing the viewer in the position of that “alien” subjectivity—of having to make sense of what is experienced without any references to decode it.
Rojas is also referencing the current situation of Covid-19 and the restrictions worldwide on travel, movement and experience. His nomadic practice has been curtailed, with hours spent watching CTV footage of feeds from Nasa satellites to orang-utans quarantined in zoos. Time is being experienced differently, as is life. With his overlay of language, texts and hieroglyphic images, Rojas muddles a sense of being able to place the work he has made within a knowable time frame. Time is a human-made construct. It is not “natural” or inherent within nature, but relative and subjective.
Rojas further questions notions of ordering and collectively determining significance in relation to Western art. Part of his overall project has been to question the museum and its role of preserving, collecting and displaying work in perpetuity. He cites his own experiences at art school, where Latin American art was barely acknowledged in the colonial Western canon of art history. As students, pre-internet, and with art books too expensive to purchase, Rojas and his peers were given small photocopied booklets of text and reproduced images, and the result was a freeing of the imagination. As Rojas observes: “It was almost like these photocopies were shouting: there are no hard facts, only fabulation and speculation! Art Histories, or rather Art Stories, are for us students to reclaim and hack”.
Rojas’s exhibition poses the question how the pandemic is altering our subjective experience of time, of language and of systems of representation, acknowledging that while “art” is also a construct, it is the result of human action that transforms matter and that relates to specific places and times.
As for what that last human artwork might be for a future alien visitor/observer to find—it could be any of the detritus or mark making they encounter on this planet, having no idea what the human species ever defined ‘art’ to be in the first place.