Bill VIola (II)

I already discussed the recent exhibit of Bill Viola at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (http://castorphans.blogspot.com/search/label/Bill%20Viola); I stressed the spiritual travel mounted in the exhibit; it should be added that it is fundamentally a travel in the netherworld, or in a cemetery; the video-paintings resemble the small pictures we can find on italian graves, pictures that are intendend to preserve the image of the dead, but that spread instead a sense of inescapable mourning. The images of Viola are at first splendidly aesthetical; but when they slowly begin to move, this motion conveys the sensation of a ghost dead long time ago.
On the other hand, death and kitsch are the two pillars of contemporary art from -at least - Warhol to Hirst. There are many resistant artists (Kounellis, Josef Beuys etc.), but they are not liked very much by the market.

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.