An exhibition at the Ragghianti Foundation on Bill Viola's beginnings in the 1970s

From April 30 to May 8, 2022, the Mezzanine of the Fondazione Ragghianti in Lucca will host the exhibition Bill Viola. The Seventies, curated by Maurizio Marco Tozzi and Alessandro Romanini, produced by Lucca Film Festival and Over The Real, supported by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, under the patronage of the City of Lucca and the Region of Tuscany. The event anticipates the 2022 edition of the Lucca Film Festival, which this year will be held in the fall, from September 23 to October 2, 2022.

The exhibition focuses on a specific period of the activity of Bill Viola (New York, 1951), among the pioneers of video art: the 1970s. The artist graduated from Experimental Studios at Syracuse University in 1973 and the following year began his career as technical director at the production studio art/tapes/22 in Florence, Italy, where he stayed for eighteen months, attending Zona non-profit art space.

Present in the exhibition are historical videos made from 1977 to 1980, such as The Reflecting Pool, Moonblood, Silent Life, Ancient of Days and Vegetable Memory, his first great successes, along with a selection of Gianni Melotti’s photographs, taken in those same years, documenting the young Bill Viola’s early experiences with other artists from around the world, who gathered in Maria Gloria Bicocchi ’s Florence space to begin using the new magnetic tape technologies.

Bill Viola explores the phenomena of sensory perception as a key to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences (birth, death, the development of consciousness) and are rooted in Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism. Already, a recurring theme is water, a symbol of life and the passage of time.

Simultaneously, on April 30 at 6 p.m. opens in the Church of San Cristoforo in Lucca Mystified, works by Luca Bellandi, curated by Riccardo Ferrucci, in collaboration with Casa d’Arte San Lorenzo. The exhibition presents Luca Bellandi’s latest pictorial production, some 20 large canvases dedicated to the films that have made the history of cinema great.

"The exhibitions promoted by the Lucca Film Festival in the 2022 edition,“ says Alessandro Romanini artistic director of the Festival’s exhibitions, ”exemplify two specific aspects that characterize the centuries-old relationship between cinema and the visual arts. The one manifested by Bill Viola with his videos from the 1970s that analyze and rework the viewer’s fascination with moving images, soliciting the perceptual structure and aiming at the subjective spiritual involvement of the viewer. As he would demonstrate with later installations, the visual arts and particularly painting represent an inspiration and a wealth of visual and technical solutions. Luca Bellandi, with his exhibition Mystified, operates an intelligent critical reflection through the medium of painting, taking on the eye of the filmmaker and working compositionally on visual parameters. In particular, he rewrites the dimension of the concept of framing, an element common to cinema, painting, photography and video."

Pictured is a portrait of Bill Viola. Ph. Credit Gianni Melotti

Hours: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. Free admission.

An exhibition at the Ragghianti Foundation on Bill Viola's beginnings in the 1970s

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