Set against the ancient Jura landscape, in the Vallée de Joux, Adrián Villar Rojas presents his first bronze sculpture. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary and co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum, the work brings together fossilised history and mechanical precision. By Allard van Hoorn.
It was a slow reveal as the winding roads took us up to the Vallée de Joux, where the birth of fine watchmaking collides with some of the oldest archeological sites in the Jura. It is a place where time meets time, one kept by fossils and layered sedimentation, another by expert mechanical engineering passed down by generations of watchmakers. This is where I encounter Adrián Villar Rojas’ new sculpture, his first in bronze, in a collapse of engineering, memory, speculation and generosity.
Villar Rojas makes us look in the rearview mirror of the future, at compressed artifacts of now into layers of eroding clay; material but also meaning; what is to be kept? What is to be preserved? Who chooses? Mankind, Nature? Are we merely fighting time, that will, given the right scale, erase all traces of our existence, our efforts to preserve, our immortalizations? But for now, we can at least keep time, geologically or on our wrist; time approximated by eons or nanoseconds, the entire spectrum of measured evolution laying before us side by side in a cradled landscape at Le Brassus.
In ‘Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy),’ the revealed sculpture commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary and realized over years of dialogue with Villar Rojas intertwines that scale of geological and engineered time, it compresses it by deconstructing, pushing by condensing material, pulling by extracting a fossil into 100’s of 1000’s of polygons that were hand placed in a computer model to create the historic artifact, not to reproduce one. Here time is simulated in a Sisyphean effort to collapse time upon itself and therefor meaning. And yes, this sculpture too will be dust one day. And in allowing us to feel this slow and fast time simultaneously is where the generosity of the sculpture lies, and with Audemars Piguet, who give the artist seemingly unlimited support to realize their vision.
The watchmaker has this generosity in their DNA where now, in the museum recently completed by Bjarke Ingels & embedded in the mountainside, this serpentine of time mimics the archeological vistas it looks out upon. Inside are the stories of generational craftmanship, passed down with passion and urgency to preserve, maintain, perpetuate. Audemars Piguet used to possess ultra-complex knowledge of automations that were shared with other watchmakers throughout the country, not patented or used for gains, but shared with the world like Volvo did with their invention of the seatbelt. There is even a studio where watches are repaired with tools that were recreated to be time-period accurate with the late 18th century to restore watches to near spiritual precision. This act then seeps through in the craftmanship of the engineering, in the gift of the architecture to the landscape and the freedom of the commissioned artist to do what is best with resources and time; to make it as valuable as possible. This is not just Swiss precision but rather a purpose driven consideration for everything that touches the Audemars Piguet universe. And for Villar Rojas the deep involvement with time; how time is made, folded and represented, how time jumps up out of a dark corner in surprise or how it pulls at you over many years. Like at my memories and understanding of time through the giant animals I saw in the Bosporus at the bottom of Leon Trotsky’s former garden during the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Made out of raw clay and branches, kids swimming among the creatures, I wonder where they are now, dissolved and washed down with the tides, re-integrated into geological time.
The amazing team of Art Foundry St.Gallen explains how vulnerabilities are built in, like backdoors programmed into computer systems to allow intruders in. In case of the sculpture these are seams that allow nature to penetrate and accelerate time, once again through oxidation, life happening. Maybe somehow there is a hidden message here in this collaborative dedication to time, to study it so thoroughly, the artist opening it up as much as possible, the engineer nailing it down in maximum precision, that forged this collaboration to succeed so preciously. Maybe Audemars Piguet and Villar Rojas are complimenting opposites like a couple meant to be together, if only for a time when in the summer of this year the sculpture will become part of a comprehensive exhibition at the co-commissioning Aspen Art Museum.
One of the horns of the triceratops skull is shaped as the Venus de Lespugue, a proto representation of the human body in the precise weight of the displaced material. The exactitudes in the sculpture-within-a-sculpture are pursued with tremendous effort, seemingly to stop time for an infinitely short impasse before the inevitable erosion sets in. This sculpture as a clock is self-winding, accumulating meaning, and has a perpetual calendar for events in the world to happen and pass and leave their fleeting marks, like a historic patina that will eventually dissolve the very precision it was made with, into the oblivion of geological time, forever.
Adrián Villar Rojas’ Untitled (The Language of the Enemy) will be on view in Le Brassus from 13 November until 15 March 2026, followed by a second presentation at Aspen Art Museum as part of a multi-floor exhibition of new site-specific works.
