The artist, who has died aged 73, used his medium to explore survival, reason, life, death and the soul. In a world of oversaturation, his art gave stillness
My most intense memory of Bill Viola’s art is watching his video of a man sinking passively underwater, before rising slowly again, with the cold North Sea actually below me. I’d travelled from London to Orkney to see a small retrospective of his works, including this piece, Ascension, at a gallery on a pier at Stromness. It was completely worth the journey. Ascension especially, with its hypnotic soundtrack of bubbling water, was an uncompromising embrace of a near-death experience.
I hope his death, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was as peaceful as he makes near-drowning look. Viola traced his interest in watery graves to his own experience of submersion in a lake as a child. Water however isn’t the only way of dying in his art. In his series Martyrs, installed in St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 2014, a man sits impassively as flames rise around him. You can certainly describe this as a religious work.
