Adrian Villar Rojas's new sculpture explores 'existential anxieties'

""Language is technology that we use to address and name things, a tool we use to communicate," Villar Rojas said at the sculpture's unveiling. "But what happens when language isn't enough to communicate with someone else? When you cannot address this 'other'? I think that's when conflict appears. When you can't really communicate, you start to speculate on the intelligence of that person. So language is the enemy.""

"In much of Villar Rojas's earlier work, "deep time was always looking at the moment after extinction-imagining these worlds of what happens when it's the end of species, the end of human life", says Audrey Teichmann, co-art curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary. "Now we're seeing a shift toward pre-history, toward the moment before arrival, and the speculation of an encounter.""

""This work will be part of our exhibition in Aspen, but it's also connected to a whole series of shows Adrián has recently presented-the Aichi Triennale, his exhibition in Seoul," says Aspen Art Museum curator-at-large Claude Adjil. "For Adrián, exhibitions don't begin and end; they form bodies of work that bleed into one another.""

A bronze Triceratops skull sits on a fluorescent-lit white plinth overlooking the Jura Mountains in the Vallée de Joux, the historic centre of Swiss horology. Language is framed as a technology used to address and name things, and the failure of language to communicate with an 'other' is linked to conflict and to speculative judgments about intelligence. The sculpture was produced through digital modelling that allowed design of every aperture in the fossil before bronze casting at a local Swiss foundry. The work marks a shift from imagining post-extinction futures toward prehistory and the moment before arrival, suggesting speculation about an encounter and linking to a series of interconnected exhibitions.

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