Bill Viola. Icons of light

A great tribute to video art artist from the 70s to today, father of video installations, sound environments and performances that are played in the search for harmony between image, a sound in the search for harmony between image.

https://www.billviola.com/ — From Gerald Fox's Bill Viola: The Road to St Paul's

The elegant and refined palace of Maria Letizia Ramolino, mother of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome, will host the temporary exhibition of one of the great masters of video art, Bill Viola, from 5 March to 26 June 2022. Curated by the artist's wife, Kira Perov, the exhibition presents 10 masterpieces by the American artist, offering excellent food for thought on the conceptuality of his works.

Bill Viola's research arises from the visual and sensorial perception produced by things or by environmental contexts. The first experiments date back to the 70s, during which he too began to collaborate with the founding father of video art, Nam June Paik. In the 80s his videos of him take on a more complex and in some ways even more theatrical character, but it is around the 90s that he focuses his efforts on universal aspects of human existence through feelings that involve the individual in the course. of his life. Characteristic are the works in which he reinterprets the ancient pictorial tradition in a contemporary key, reworking classic iconographic and iconological elements in a modern key.

The artist, of Italian-American origin, defines his moving images as an art not comparable to cinema, not even to realism, although something real is felt since the images represent real things. Bill Viola's research focuses on humanity: faces, bodies, people who are called to interact with nature, life and death, rebirth.

Numerous works in exhibitions with reference to the natural element of water, to which the artist is particularly attached. At the age of six he nearly drowned in a lake. Despite the danger, little Bill Viola could not help but be fascinated by the underwater beauties. Hence the insistence on representing figures submerged by water, as if in this way they went "beyond the surface of things [pointing] to their soul". Distinctive is the repeated electronic background sound similar to what can be heard from the depths of the ocean.

Nicknamed "American technician" during his work as production assistant at art / tapes / 22, Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi's art production center in Florence, the city where "museums were created for art and not for art created for museums, as happened in the contemporary scene "that the artist had left in New York. The art and culture of the Tuscan capital sparked the interest of a young Bill Viola for ancient art which, together with the works of the Sienese masters and the Flemish and Spanish ones of the Prado Museum which he visited in the same years, began to become a source of research and inspiration for some of his works on display.

"The works that re-read the ancient are not just quotations. They are not mere exercises of re-enactment or appropriation, and they are not even films. However, they are linked to something that other artists of the past have done".

Also recurring in Bill Viola's work is the element of sand, earth and the theme of the desert, a metaphor for "portals to the afterlife" and for the dualism of life-death, provocative of visions and hallucinations, an infinite space in which to lose one's own soul.

The death of Bill Viola's parents and the attack on the Twin Towers lead him to reflect on the suffering and pain of the individual but also of the community. Thus a series of video installations are born, in which the faces of the protagonists are tormented by a pain, often hidden behind the work in such a way that the viewer can identify with that torment and relive their personal pains in those mangled faces.

Certainly the most impressive and compelling work that can be admired in the exhibition is The Martyrs. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Four video installations, born in 2014, which represent man's ability to endure pain in order to remain faithful to his principles. Metaphor of strength, perseverance, endurance and sacrifice, until the acceptance of death. There is no Christian implication, despite the title, but these martyrs speak out for the sufferings of the human condition. A woman hung by the wrists whose body is whipped by the wind, a man sitting in the flames with a look that pierces the eyes of the viewer, a man hung by the ankles with a cascade of water that hits him from above and a another man submerged by the earth that falls inexorably, close the exhibition at Palazzo Bonaparte.

An exhibition with a linear path, easy to follow and that keeps you in suspense from start to finish. Evocative and exciting works capable of capturing the gaze for whole minutes making time go by without the visitor realizing it. A gloomy and dark setting that creates the ideal atmosphere to get to know Bill Viola through his videos installed in rooms that are transformed into intimate places, mausoleums of memory that touch the visitor's spirituality.