Last Saturday, December 13, The Impossible Order of the World. Contemporary Art opened at Fundación Proa. Curated by Francisco Lemus, the exhibition brings together 26 artists of great vitality within the contemporary art scene.
We might say that the “impossible order of the world” is, precisely, a point of departure for contemporary art: a way of making visible the conflict between order and instability, in which the contingent and the provisional do not seek to restore a lost order, but rather to reveal that tension.
In a world saturated with images, Lemus proposes new relationships through a selection of works that, due to their monumentality, take over the space in order to assert their presence in the face of contemporary volatility. In a context where nothing seems to endure, monumentality functions as resistance to forgetting, as if the work were stating: “if everything moves, I remain here to point it out.”
The exhibition is conceived as a landscape in the Romantic sense, where the works operate as elements of a constructed nature, capable of momentarily removing the viewer from the everyday and immersing them in an aesthetic dialogue that invites a different form of attention.
Each gallery proposes a thematic axis without limiting possible interpretations. Works such as those by Martín Legón and Valeska Soares focus on time and the archive, understood not as something fixed, but as a space in motion that enables new readings of the past and the present.
Along these lines, The Theater of Disappearance was a monumental project created for the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017. There, Adrián Villar Rojas worked with the museum’s collections—from Egyptian and Greek art to contemporary objects—to produce hybrid sculptures, combining bodies, fragments, utensils, and pieces from different periods and cultures. The work engages directly with the idea of the “impossible order of the world,” showing how the fragments that shape our history and our gaze can be combined in unexpected ways to create an imagined archaeological landscape.
The curator’s research led him to identify points of convergence among artists and sensibilities that engage with the tensions of contemporaneity, selecting works that, due to their complexity, often remain outside the public eye.
The Collection celebrates the loan of the following works for the exhibition:
Patricia Ayres, 14-5-18-5-21-19, 2023
Andrés Bedoya, Vestimenta II, 2016
Dan Perjovschi, El País 21.01 Make Me (America) Great Again, 2017
Valeska Soares, Any Moment Now… (Spring), 2014
Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance (1), (4), and (6), 2017
The exhibition at Fundación Proa will be on view until March 2026.
We invite you to visit the Foundation’s website for further information: The Impossible Order of the World. Contemporary Art.
