Adrián Villar Rojas - 'The Language of the Enemy' Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary
Adrián Villar Rojas has unveiled “Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy),” a new work that imagines a scene from deep time. Co-commissioned by Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the sculpture reconsiders the origins of symbolic creation – language, art, ritual – not as the triumph of a single species but as a shared inheritance. Premiering in the Jura Mountains within the Vallée de Joux, the work is central to Villar Rojas’ multi-floor exhibition at Aspen Art Museum in summer 2026, where it will feature amongst a body of new site-specific works.
Drawing on more than a decade of research, Villar Rojas envisions a world in which Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have shared the same impulse to create meaning – a collaboration that unsettles received ideas of human exceptionalism. This encounter is imagined as a transmission across time, a gift from one vanished lineage to another. The work invites viewers to reflect on coexistence not as an ethical ideal but as a biological and historical reality.
Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy) takes the form of a life-sized triceratops skull, from which a human figure – the prehistoric Venus of Lespugue, one of the earliest known representations of the body – emerges as if carved from the bone itself. This hybrid organism evokes both fossil and artifact, collapsing distinctions between nature and culture, species and symbol, and illuminating the uncertain beginnings of representational life.
The work’s creation involved an intricate symbiosis between digital modelling and material construction, where the precision of computational design meets the tactile intelligence of sculpture. Each micro-fracture, cavity and vein in the bronze was digitally composed, allowing the skull to acquire the geological complexity of a natural fossil. Through this process, the work inhabits the threshold between the virtual and the material, suggesting that technology – like evolution – is a means through which matter imagines itself anew.
Presented in the Jura Mountains, the work resonates with the geological strata of the Vallée de Joux, one of the birthplaces of Swiss horology and a terrain whose limestone formations preserved the Jurassic fossils that gave the era its name. The sculpture’s digitally modelled bronze surface recalls processes of mineral compression, mirroring the valley’s deep-time landscape, where sediment, fossil and invention converge. In Aspen, too, the work finds a home in the surrounding peaks – mountains shaped by glacial time and layered histories – inviting reflection on the slow, intertwined processes of nature and human imagination.