13 January 2016

The inexorable flow of time is once again at the center of the work of Adrián Villar Rojas, a guest of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo with his Rinascimento, a monumental installation unveiled to coincide with Artissima last November on which the young Argentinean artist worked for over a month with his “theater company”—as he calls the staff of artists, craftsmen and technicians that follow him all over the world. The exhibition curated by Irene Calderoni, his first one-man show in Italy, is a follow-up to the previous one in Istanbul, from where nine truckloads of material have arrived: The Most Beautiful of All Mothers, seventeen plinths on which stood sculptures studded with relics of plants, animals and minerals. Rinascimento is revealed to visitors by degrees, in a crescendo that starts out from the traces scattered around the entrance and along the corridor: cast-off clothing, shoes, a hat, a fur coat, an umbrella, a pair of glasses. All elements that speak of absence and physical dissolution and that prepare us for entry into a room filled with objects of every kind. The impression created is that of a post-apocalypse landscape, in which we are beguiled by the sinister fascination of strange fossils dotted with fruit and feathers, bird’s nests, shells, eggs, stuffed animals, rusty work tools, jugs, coins, rings, furs and fabrics. The almost total absence of artificial lighting emphasizes the drama of the setting and the evocation of that incredible process of change, decay and rebirth to which every form of life is subject.

Rinascimento, Adrián Villar Rojas
Curated by Irene Calderoni
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
November 4, 2015 – February 28, 2016