Bill Viola at the Grand Palais

Some artists fulfil—sometimes quite brilliantly—all your expectations and ideas about art; and then there are artists who break the mould. One such artist is Bill Viola. His pioneering work on video art, which has led to the creation of a veritable ‘métier’, with its own instruments, colours, sounds, and formats, is already a major achievement; and taking this new formal art even further, Viola tackles themes that the plastic arts have never addressed, or at least not as directly. Themes could perhaps be summarised as one theme, that of time and everything related to it. Viola describes himself as a ‘sculptor of time’. And his video art, his large projected ‘paintings’, most of which are almost motionless, are closer to the plastic arts than cinema.
Given Louis Roederer’s constant quest for perfection, this exhibition has a particular significance; the exhibition does not merely highlight the recent work of one artist—it also paves the way for an entirely new creative field and an entirely new world of works that are waiting to be discovered.