| Video installation by Bill Viola at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Bill Viola's project is a highlight of the Moscow Biennale. Contemporary art rarely appears in this form: elegant design, classically perfect forms and a powerful impact on the viewer. The video is based on the painting “The Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth” (1528-1529) by the Florentine mannerist Jacopo Carucci, nicknamed Pontormo. Leaving three of the four figures, Viola exchanged the beautiful frozen moment for a slightly prolonged smooth movement of the videotape, working at ten times the frequency. With slow scrolling - forty-five seconds of real time are expanded into ten minutes - every slightest movement becomes clear and significant: a glance, a touch of hands, curly clothes, a bewitching whisper, gusts of wind... On a narrow street, too quickly shrinking into the depths (in in the gateway - some small dubious figures), women meet and talk. Too slow time sends the scene to otherworldly distances, where a memorable meeting took place and remains forever. The viewer is drawn into this rhythm, breathes more slowly, and enjoys every second. He understands that something extraordinary is happening before his eyes. The same jubilant triumph of video technology that once was the reign of oil painting is not an end in itself - the spirit in Viola’s video painting breathes as freely as many centuries ago in his predecessors.
Although Viola says that the project is based on a universal human value, that is, the “meeting” in general, and he is equally interested in different religious systems, it is difficult to perceive “Greeting” outside the gospel story, to which it belongs not only in form, but also in its striking a feeling of miracle. Viola breaks through the stereotype of old painting, where it is difficult to see the content behind the brilliance of technique and the radiance of colors. He fills the emasculated, time-weary form with new life. Against the flow of fashion, the art of experience is launched at full speed and works with high themes - life and death. Of the Russian artists, the most important for him is Tarkovsky, he even named his son in his honor. Viola’s mysticism is not abstruse, but harmonious, exciting, like an adventure in another dimension, where only you were waiting.
Confirmation is the extraordinary popularity of the project. Despite the fact that exhibitions of Viola, who has been actively working for thirty years, occur constantly and everywhere, the ten-year-old masterpiece is shown more often than other works (also wonderful). Video is a democratic technology; you can even bring it home on a video cassette. But seeing a masterpiece on the big screen is a special pleasure; now it will be shared with Muscovites by residents of three cities on two continents. Faina BALAKHOVSKAYA |
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