Bill Viola, the pioneer of video artis no more: he died on Friday, in his home in Long Beach, California, at the age of 73. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at an early age and had been struggling to communicate for some time. His art, however, is more vital than ever.
The bond with Italy
Bill Viola is an artist Italian-American born in the Bronx in January 1951 (are you wondering how to pronounce his last name? In American it is Smallpox but he preferred the Italian pronunciation, Viola, to honor his father’s origins). He had a special bond with our country throughout his life: in his early twenties, in the mid-seventies, he came to Florence to work in what was the first video production center in Italy (it was called Art/Tapes/22 and was directed by a woman: Maria Gloria Bicoccai). For Bill Viola, fresh from university studies in painting and music, it was the opportunity to work with artists such as Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Jannis Kounellis, because at the time in Italy the avant-garde was really galloping and dictating the international art agenda. Bill Viola returned to Italy several times for pleasure and to inaugurate exhibitions that left their mark: at Villa Panza of Varese, in 2012, and Strozzi Palace of Florence in 2017, in Royal Palace of Palermo in 2021, in Royal Palace of Milan in 2023. When illness made it impossible for him to travel, it was his wife Kira Perov to bear witness to it. These are just some of his many exhibitions that have toured the world and major museums in forty years of a career capable of clearing video art in large institutions and among the general public.
Now that he’s gone, what’s left for us?
Unlike other artists, Bill Viola’s works are not classically “tangible”: his art is fluid and digital by nature. It takes time to be seen: what you see reproduced here are in fact only stillframes of his video works that last several minutes. Bill Viola was capable of merging painting and theatre and to create something completely new which is precisely video art, a representation high level of drama and aesthetics, which wants to communicate something about the world. To fully enjoy it, we must be patient: to stand in front of his screens and watch his spectacular videos.
Bill Viola taught the artists of his generation and those who came after that art and technique can go hand in hand: he was highly appreciated for his filming skills, many consider him (and rightly so) a wizard of recording and editing. Until the end, Bill Viola pushed experimentation as much as he could: his videos revolutionized the history of art for their aesthetic rendering, colors, sound effects. Nothing is left to chance.
Bill Viola was also an artist capable of creating bridges. Between West and East, for example: in the 1980s, during a long stay in Japanstudied Eastern philosophies, embraced the Buddhism. Each of his works is charged with an intensely lived spirituality. He has created bridges even between the past and the present: his was – as the title of the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi stated – truly a «electronic renaissance». Bill Viola has always looked with admiration at the lesson of the great masters of art history: Michelangelo, Pontormo, Leonardo, Mantegna, Rembrandt are the artists who have influenced him the most. Some of his most successful works are precisely the theatrical and digital transformation of masterpieces of the past, filtered through his attentive eye for details, light, and the dynamics between people. The success that his very refined art also had on great audience proves, once again, that there is no technical genius without the beauty of emotion that can move everyone’s heart.
Source: Vanity Fair
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