Bill Viola in Rome

The exhibition of Bill Viola in Roma, in the Palazzo delle Esposizione, is almost ending. The about 15 works represent a spiritual travel. They are intended as something like a via crucis, where you have to stop before each video awaiting the development of the story - in fact each video contains a "surprise" - but I preferred to walk freely among the panels. The impression is to stroll in the rooms of a Reinaissance estate, surrounded by devotional paintings. The plasma video-panels, in fact, have the same dimensions, proportions, frames, composition, colours of Reinaissance paintings; a video quotes explicity the Resurrection by Piero della Francesca. The spiritual travel has not to be underestimated, but this exhibition tells us much about classic painting. Raphael and Piero, had they had the extraordinary technological tools of Viola, with his perfect reproduction of reality, would not have hesitated to use them; morevorer, when we look at the paintings of the Reinaissance, we often overemphasize the formal perfection, forgetting that they all were devotional or allegoric or exoteric paintings. A great achievement of XVII century was to fuse the spiritual values of Christianity with formal perfection of the Ancients; and Bill Viola repeats somewhat this miracle.