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Tuesday, 8 April

Back to this:

It's gorgeous and comforting--home.

But: Why is a half move, back to what’s ‘normal’ so unsettling? I can’t stay still or get down to work and it’s not just the high stacks of bills and other post awaiting my attention.

A good time to go to an exhibition, which I did with Alison M., visiting from London. It's a hugely stimulating retrospective at the Grand Palais of Bill Viola's work (http://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/article/bill-viola-toute-lactu-de-lexpo).

photo Bill Viola_REP0250 by François-Digital

He has put video inside a picture frame, thus building on the ‘still arts’ of painting and photography. Figures, stories, move slowly across the screens that frame them. Slow is a key word: as you walk through the dark, quiet rooms, you’re forced to leave your edgy, nervous self outside. The heart slows by a several beats. The three I found most moving were Quintet of the Unseen (above), where a group of five people slowly change expression, and angles of interaction; the series Catherine’s Room, five different screens showing different moments of a woman’s day, in the same room (from yoga, to sewing, to work, to eating, to preparing for bed); and the room with Going Forth by Day. Waiting for the water to come gushing out of the house in The Deluge caused Hitchcockian nail-biting. Really worth seeing.