BILL VIOLA

“There's another world out there just beyond the world we're in. It's just on the other side of that translucent, semitransparent surface.”

Bill Viola was born in New York in 1951, and from the very beginning, his life seemed destined to unfold between the visible and the invisible. He dedicated himself entirely to video art as a medium, and as the instrument of a lifelong philosophical and spiritual quest. And again and again, at the centre of his vision, there is water. Water, for Viola, is theological. He has spoken often of a childhood memory : falling into a lake at the age of six, and seeing, rather than terror, a world of otherworldly beauty beneath the surface, he discovered in those depths what he would later call "the invisible world”. His art is the record of this submersion.

Viola has said he thinks of his camera as a mirror, not a window. And water is the original mirror, the first surface in which a human being ever looked. To stand before one of his works is to stand at the edge of your own reflection.
He spent decades asking what it means to truly see, to perceive what radiates beneath the surface of things. At Les Passagées we ask the same question, from the inside out: what inhabits us, transforms us, connects us to all living things? his work resonates with us for his understanding that liquid is not just a material, it is a way of thinking. 

Water, for Viola, is the element that holds everything together: time, transformation, the passage between states of being. It is never still, never fixed, always carrying something across.

further reading: billviola.com , https://www.pinaultcollection.com/fr/boursedecommerce/bill-viola-reveler-linvisible
Two major works by Viola from the Pinault Collection are currently on display as part of the exhibition Clair-obscur, including Fire Woman (2005).
On view until 24 August 2026 at the Bourse de Commerce.