Two pitfalls lie in wait for artists who win the prestigious commission to create works for the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The obvious risk is the view, onto Central Park and the skylines of Midtown and the West Side, that can minimize or overshadow the art on display. (Cornelia Parker, the British sculptor who erected a Hitchcockian house facade, fell into that trap last year.) The other, stealthier risk is the museum below. When you are literally standing on top of five millenniums of art history, even the most assured artist can be spooked.

I suspect that’s what happened to Adrián Villar Rojas, the hyperproductive Argentine who is the youngest artist to exhibit up here since the museum opened its roof garden 30 years ago. Mr. Villar Rojas, 37, is an ambitious sculptor and installation artist, with a sci-fi writer’s imagination and an ecologist’s anxieties. His best works, often large in scale, appear as future ruins of a posthuman society that has breached its organic limits. For the Met, though, he has shifted gears to remix the museum’s own collection, absorbing well-known objects from the galleries downstairs into mashed-up totems and table displays. He’s produced a decorous and unexpectedly slight show, with the apocalyptic smudges scrubbed away for summer.

“The Theater of Disappearance,” as the rooftop project is called, features seven vertical sculptures, all uniform black, which unite multiple figures — Met statues in some cases, human models in others — into bizarre totems. A bearded man in a puffer vest has a Hellenistic statue sitting on one shoulder and a Mesoamerican one on the other, in a museological riff on the old gag of the shoulder-perched angel and devil. A kissing couple stand atop an African lidded vessel; a smiling woman straddles a statue of an Egyptian scribe and holds a bust of Tutankhamen aloft. Instead of the unfired, fossil-like blend of clay and cement the artist usually employs, these toneless statues are of urethane foam coated with licks of matte industrial paint. Less painstaking than Charles Ray’s latter-day effigies, less unnerving than Katharina Fritsch’s animals and saints, the sculptures here look dismayingly like oversize Disney figurines.