From a life-sized whale beached in a forest in Patagonia, to the mummified corpse of Kurt Cobain, the Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas is world-renowned for his monumental clay and multimedia sculptures. “The first thing that hits you about his work is the size of the installations,” says Jordan Bahat, who directed today’s portrait of the artist. “It’s obvious but, as in the past, he so often works on a monumental scale, making the installations totally immersive. You’re confronted by the sheer scope of the work.” Filmed on location at his latest site-specific solo exhibition, Los Teatros de Saturno, which transformed the Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City into a unwieldy wasteland, Villa Rojas brings exuberance and a dash of colour to his preoccupation with ecology, time and decay. Here, like a contemporary Pompeii, running shoes, organic matter and the artist’s painted ceramic forms collide in a landscape of dust. Despite being a fast-rising star of the contemporary art world, whose elephantine installation “Today We Reboot the Planet” launched the new Zaha Hadid-designed Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London last year, Villar Rojas remains disinterested in building an archive; his epic creations are made using fragile materials such as unfired clay, that are dismantled and destroyed once an exhibition has ended. “I believe that the temporary nature of the work gives it a certain power,” explains Bahat. “We acquire, hoard, and ingest culture without distinguishing high from low, and at such a rate that things do become meaningless. So, to say something is temporary, and not just temporary but that an exhibit has an expiration date—that’s powerful.”