Bill Viola made video art ask the biggest, most universal questions

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

Bill Viola: obituaryBill Viola: ‘the Rembrandt of the video age’

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.

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