Bill Viola and the importance of making visible what can not be seen

Bill Viola will go on show (from November 23rd to February 20th) in the Palazzo Te, Mantova. It is not the first time that the American artist has been exhibited in ancient contexts or alongside the works of the Renaissance. Several times in the past, the themes and iconography of Italian Renaissance painting have actually been a source of inspiration for Viola. In the work entitled “Emergence”, 1995, for example, he reinterpreted the “Deposition” by Masolino; and in 2002, in “The Greeting”, he reviewed the “Visitation” by Pontormo.

 

Now, in Mantova, we will see his work titled “The Raft”, among the frescoes by Giulio Romano. “The Raft” is a video that lasts about 10 minutes, with a still shot and a slow motion, that shows the fall and the resistance of a group of 19 people in modern clothes while being hit by a violent jet of water. Some critics have noticed some similarities between the characters of this piece and the ones painted by Giulio Romano in the Palazzo Te: the Giants felled by the collapse of mountains and invested by swollen rivers. However, we can say that this relationship is very weak because it is based on an analogy that is only about the fiction, and there is indeed no relations between the two conceptual meanings.

 

During the preparation of “The Raft”, the artist has sketched on a notepad different reproductions of famous works such as the frescoes of “The Judgement” by Luca Signorelli in the Duomo of Orvieto and the “Raft of the Medusa” by Gericault. As you can easily see, he takes as models two artists who can hardly be compared. On that account, the connections between Bill Viola and the art of the past are to be considered only in terms of research that result then in a very personal interpretation.

 

On the contrary, what seems to be more interesting is his relation with the present time. The scenes of “The Raft” are infact slowed down in order to allow the viewer to grasp details otherwise invisible. So the most remarkable aspect of “The Raft” can be pinpointed in the relationship with the “unseen”.

 

About this latter aspect, it is really notable what the artist himself has stated, a few years ago, about the potential of the web. “I think the Internet today is possibly one of the most accurate representations of the social nature of human beings. Human society is a fundamental network of relations that goes back to each individual’s childhood, families, circle of friends, cultural background and so on, extending out all around the world. For the first time in human life we have an artificial system that can embody and represent that invisible world. What digital technology is giving us is the ability to represent invisible things as well as visible things”.

 

In this perspective of thinking, we can conclude that “The Raft” is much closer to the bits of the web than it is to the Giants painted by Giulio Romano.

July 15, 2015