The main nave of the Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum welcomes the public in almost total darkness, were it not for the six-meter-high vertical screen suspended from the altar of this former 17th-century religious temple.
On that screen, a male character can be seen lying on a stone slab. He is the Tristan of Arthurian mythology, one of the Knights of the Round Table; he has just died with the wounds caused by a betrayal by the sword. In almost all the versions of him, the myth tells that, after Tristán perished, his beloved Iseult chooses death to join him in spirit.
What is seen below within the shadows of the space is impressive due to the magnitude of the format. A liquid substance begins to emerge from Tristán’s body and rises into nothingness. First, a well-defined line of small transparent pearls emerges from his body; then more and more pearly figures rise up to become an inverted waterfall. It is then that the viewer realizes that they are drops of water that later become masses of liquid in a scene played in reverse. And Tristán’s body rises with the water, it seems that it is dragged up by the torrent, until finally disappearing into the void. The scene represents the ascent of the soul after his death, perhaps to join Iseult.
That piece inhabiting the main nave of the Ex Teresa is called “The ascension of Tristán (The sound of the mountain under a waterfall)” (2005) and is by the celebrated American artist Bill Viola, a central part of Suspended time, the first exhibition individual that is carried out on Viola in Mexico, with a meticulous selection of eight works from different periods, which is possible due to the collaboration of the venue with the Fundación Telefónica in our country.
In dialogue with painting
“The Ascension of Tristán” is an example of the confusion, the performance, the duality, the play of reflections that the visitor will appreciate in the other seven pieces distributed in the enclosure.
Viola is one of the great masters of contemporary video art who, with more desire to consolidate it in a certain Olympus, critics and the press have called him “the Caravaggio of high technology”, although it is impossible to equal genius due to the abyss between disciplines and times so incomparable. Keeping her distance, it is called as such because Viola likes to drink from the classical, baroque and Renaissance masters, their palette, their themes and the spirituality of their compositions, to ground a video work based on myth, transition and dualities. .
The sound artist and director of the Ex Teresa, Francisco Rivas, declares that the exhibition concentrates the idea of the manipulation of time through the speed of a video and opens the way in the search for the paradoxes of existence, opposite poles that are they touch through a barrier determined by the water, as if it were a membrane between the earthly and the spiritual world, the tangible and the one of dreams, the one of life and death.
“A lot of Bill Viola’s works try to be moving pictures,” shares Rivas. He recognizes in his work “a deep sense of religiosity that has nothing to do with a dogma but from the relationship of the body with the elements.”
For its part, the co-curator Melisa Lio Flores adds that “video allows the ability to work over time, which painting or other types of image formats do not allow. Bill Viola assimilates time as raw material, tries to prolong it and makes it palpable in each of his works”.
Other pieces to distinguish
Within the exhibition, works such as “El Mensajero” (1996) stand out, a loop in which an individual “inhabits” who emerges and submerges in a body of water that gradually deforms its image until it becomes a kind of abstract art, such as if it were the materialization and dematerialization of a divine being, depending on the moment in which it is appreciated.
In the installation “Three Women” (2008), an older woman, a middle-aged woman and a younger woman can be seen on the other side of a wall of water in a blurred plane, like a space alien to ours, non-existence. The three of them are barely perceived back there, they are diffuse, until the eldest decides to cross the liquid threshold and take the rest to this plane of total definition, until she herself decides to go back to the bottom. She little by little she will follow the rest of her. All this in a slow and peaceful time to observe. It is a beautiful metaphor about fertility, life and death through the generations and part of this contemplative and philosophical exhibition devoid of gallery texts.
Who is Bill Viola?
Since the early 1970s, Bill Viola’s work has been seen around the world. In 1987 he exhibited installations and videos at MoMA and in 1995 he represented the United States at the 46th Venice Art Biennale. In 1997, at the Whitney Museum, he organized a solo exhibition with 35 of his best works, a show that later traveled to six museums in the United States and Europe. He has also exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, at the National Gallery in London, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, to name a few.
Bill Viola. suspended time
Former Teresa Current Art
- Licentiate Primo Verdad 8, Colonia Centro Histórico
- Valid until August 28
- From Tuesday to Sunday, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
- Free entry
technique master
Bill Viola’s work does not have a single digital effect, instead it is rich in technical visual effects that provide illusions of divinity in each of the pieces that it is inevitable to associate the frescoes with biblical scenes and characters that inhabit the Ex Teresa Arte Museum Current. There is a frank dialogue in this space of contemplation where it seems that time is suspended.
ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.mx