Bill Viola

Bill Viola’s work is one of the greatest examples of contemporary art’s ability to achieve transcendence, expressing an almost ancestral pietas, a universal and shared mysticism. These feelings are reinforced by his exhibition “Inner Visions,” which sets up a figurative via crucis, or Way of the Cross, its videos’ overly theatrical characters; their extremely slowed-down, expanded, or inverted time; their oneiric spaces suffused with light; and their altered sounds convey a suspended, estranged, contemplative atmosphere. The exhibition’s structure is divided into two conceptual cores: the first is more ritualistic, the second more focused on the careful examination of human emotions. Viewers are welcomed by the monumental The Crossing, 1996, a depiction of a cathartic annihilation of the body in the presence of fire and water––primordial and regenerative elements. The Greeting, 1995, and the intense Emergence, 2002, modeled respectively on famous works by Pontormo and Masolino, reveal the temporal shifting from the original iconographic model––Italian Renaissance painting––in a passage from the third dimension of spatial perspective to the fourth, temporal dimension. This motif returns in Catherine’s Room, 2001, the technological evolution of a predella depicting the everyday life of a dignified woman. Other works, such as Silent Mountain, 2001, The Locked Garden, 2000, and Anima, 2001, present not just a glossy, formal perfection but also differentiated, expanded emotional states in an incoercible present. These reactualize the complexity of humankind in all its multiplicity: joy, solitude, anger, pity, grief, and suffering. Viola’s emblematic statement of his poetics comes to mind: “No beginning / No end / No direction / No duration. Video as mind.” It’s an assertion that best summarizes the artist’s attempt to move beyond the physical element and to break up the analogical relationship between image and reality in the realm of Baudrillard’s “technologies of the intangible.” Viola skillfully pushes the video medium to the limits of the sublime.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.