Imbued with mystery and spirituality, the work of this video artist is of great power. At the Grand Palais, which dedicated its very first retrospective to him in France in 2014, his installations had made a lasting impression.
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“I was born at the same time as the video“, said Bill Viola. The American artist, known for his monumental video installations such as those at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2014, died on Friday, July 12, 2024.
He “passed away peacefully at home” at the age of 73, his studio said in an Instagram post, specifying that he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
Born in New York in 1951, Bill Viola began studying visual arts at Syracuse University (New York) before branching out into more experimental research. His first large-scale video installations date back to the early 1970s, during the boom in new video art and performances.
Over time, influenced in particular by the Italian painters of the Quatrocento (Giotto, Lorenzetti and Duccio), his work became more intimate and reflected a personal spiritual quest. In 1980, he had met a Zen master in Japan, Daien Tanaka, who had become his spiritual master.
In his work, Bill Viola wanted, he said, “sculpting time”. “Time is the raw material of film and video. The mechanics can be cameras, film and cassettes, what we work with is time“, explained Bill Viola about his work, which is shrouded in mystery.
Its aesthetics “is similar to the practice of meditation, which consists of focusing on the present moment, concentrating one’s gaze to go further in the perception of a subject”analyzed the Grand Palais, which presented an exhibition by Bill Viola in 2014.
We remember this impressive exhibition, which showed more than twenty monumental works representing hours of video and a device of more than thirty screens with metaphysical themes.