Bill Viola
Bill Viola
Bill Viola is an American artist. He is considered as the pioneer of video art. He doesn’t use the video as a simple medium of communication, but he employs it as the matter of his art more than the painter.
His work has for main theme life and death. Bill Viola has for inspiration the pictorial art, especially the painting of the Renaissance.
He admires Giotto an Italian artist. Bill Viola likes the concept where in one and only painting there are several moments. He uses the polyptic as principal support. He directed his works in the big installation on the wall with screen.
Nantes triptych is a video installation showing a woman giving birth. Bill Viola who is captive by the birth and the new born who is blind during the first moment of his life. Bill Viola deals in the video Silence Life.
In the second screen there is a man suspended in water and in the third screen a very old woman on her death bed, who is Bill Viola’s mother. He shot her during the last moment of her life.
The triptych is punctuated by strong emotions. It’s a strange atmosphere that Bill Viola makes us feel. His work is very personal, he opposes the born of a son to the death troes of a mother.
Bill Viola creates animated painting, he is always inspired by the painting of the Renaissance. Emergence is a good example, it repeats a theme of the resurrection of Christ, especially the pieta of Masolino.
Bill Viola wants to touch the viewer, by experiences of life.
In his video installation 5 angels for the Millennium, he deals with his own experience. When he was a child he almost drown. He retranscribes this event in his work. He found this experience wonderful, he thought he was in paradise.
The video installation evokes the passage to the year two thousand by the mean of 5 screens representing the departing, birth, fire, ascending and creation.
In his video we are plunged into silence, when the bodies come out of the water where the silence is transformed in sound deafening. The video represents a man plunged slowly into darkness and in counter clockwise. It’s a visual experience and resonant for the viewer.
Bill Viola creates an experience in each of his video installation, giving a strong emotion.
The work of Bill Viola is very interesting, his work can touch everybody, he deals with the experience of life, it deals with everybody. The association between the picture and the sound in the dark we are carried away into Bill Viola’s world.