Over the last 40 years, Bill Viola has consistently developed the most powerful works of time-based art in the world. His installations, videos, and stage collaborations have produced a lexicon–a whole language corpus–on how one can perceive the self, the other, and the experience of time. Playing with a language of his own making, he created a body of work that takes its own place in art history.
“Time makes my art possible,” said Bill Viola in an interview. He uses time as an instrument to enhance perception and to generate a state of semi-hypnosis in the viewer. His works are a gateway for spectators to explore their inner self. He makes the experience of time physical, tangible, corporeal. Many of his installations have given a body to time. It is paradoxical that an artist that chose the very medium that represents the information
overload of our era and the acceleration of life has used this medium to produce some-
thing with the opposite meaning. Thus, he forces us to look below the surface, to penetra-
te the image and to dare enter the realm of the invisible. One of the things art can still do
is to slow down time.
For this exhibition, we have selected works that reveal the condition of a sculptor of time. Inverted Birth, for instance, uses space, scale, and emptiness to reveal the dimension of time, as birth is symbolically reverted. Chott El Djerid, is an early work that explores the limits of the video resolution to reveal the condition of the desert, where light and heat are the painter’s pallets. Viola once said to me that “landscape itself is the imagination”.
His works are a meditation on life, death, transcendence, rebirth, time and space. By proposing a new way of seeing while painfully aware of the brevity of life, his images give insight into these fundamental questions of human existence and demonstrate the universality of his work, which transcends cultural barriers. His works are conceived as inner metaphysical experiences for him and for the spectator. There is no conclusion or resolution but the experience conditions us to learn more about the fears ancestrally rooted within ourselves. He does so through challenges to our perception and awareness. He speaks with the sleeping animal within us inspired by experiences of darkness so deep that they lead us to the thresholds of our vision. Such is the case of the video The Passing and his masterpiece I Do not Know What It Is I Am Like, in which he confronts wild animals.
The existential questions of origin and destination, birth, and death are gradually being released from Viola’s narrative. The work focuses on the journey, where walkers who come
from nowhere pass by without stopping, sleepers rest so deeply as if they were not alive, and water unveils landscapes of light and heat. He wishes us to experience the present dimension of the journey. Through the body of his work Viola offers us the most precious assets of life: time and memory.
Marcello Dantas
