Renowned artist Bill Viola died Saturday at the age of 73 at his home in Long Beach, California. He had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for some time.
Viola had an influential career as a video artist, a field in which he played a pioneering role. He broke through with his videos in the 1970s, following having studied painting and electronic music. From the 1990s onwards, he was an indispensable part of the art scene. In 1995, he represented the US for the first time at the Venice Biennale, and once more in 2007.
The influence of the old masters in painting was never far away in Viola’s works. He was known for his gigantic tableaux vivants in intense colours, in which scenes by Italian Renaissance painters or Flemish primitives seem to come to life. And many of his videos, with their theatrical light and shadow effects, are reminiscent of baroque masterpieces.
The nickname “Rembrandt of video art”, which Laura Cumming, art critic at The Observer, gave him in 2001 because of his pioneering role, was therefore appropriate for several reasons. But when you think of Viola, you think not only of the Dutch master, but also of the Italian grandmaster Michelangelo. Viola entered into dialogue with his work on several occasions, including in exhibitions in Florence and London.
Viola’s oeuvre focuses on existential themes such as death and consciousness. In The Nantes triptych (1992), he used film footage of his dying mother, who had died a year earlier. He juxtaposed this footage with a video of a birth, so that birth and death become intensely intertwined. When the child opens its eyes for the first time, Viola’s mother closes hers.
Still uit Emergence. — © rr
In Emergence, Viola depicted a kind of resurrection: a naked young man emerges from a rainwater well and two women take care of him. “Figures that sink into the water and later rise once more are common in Viola’s oeuvre,” wrote art editor Jan Van Hove regarding that work. “As a child, he almost drowned in a lake. He would never forget that event. In the accident, he found the inspiration for his very own, mysterious visual language.”
Silence
This visual language is not only characterised by the baroque lighting effects, but also by the abundant use of slow motion. Whatever he depicted, he always did so with a dramatic slowing down, which gives his scenes something meditative, seeming to escape from time. “There are so many things that we don’t even see anymore”, Viola said regarding this. “That’s what I try to show.” The preference for slowing down, for standing still at things, was instilled in the artist from an early age. “Even as a child I had the impression that everything in films and television programmes goes much too fast. I constantly wanted to freeze the image. In video you can do that.”
In 2014, Viola created one of his best-known video works, Martyrs, for St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is a quadriptych in which three men and a woman are tormented by the four elements. Despite powerful winds and waterfalls, the ‘martyrs’ remain almost unmoved. In 2016, another work was added to the London cathedral: Mary, in which Mary holds her dead son on her lap.
Viola has worked with many celebrities, including the rock band Nine Inch Nails. With opera director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, he made an adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Last winter, the Musée de La Boverie in Liège dedicated an exhibition to him.
