JAMES COHAN GALLERY Had we yet world enough.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY

Had we yet world enough, and time...Old-master painting breathed by the agency of this show, but I also remembered the seventeenth-century imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer Andrew Marvell, and the time he imagined devoting to a lover's body: An hundr years should move to praise / Thine organ of sights and on thy forehead gaze. The heart of the exhibition was a series of DVD tableaux vivants, playing forward flat screens that hung onward the wall like paintings or stood upon pedestals like propped-open books. The images showed the bulk of mankind caught in a range of emotional states--joy, anger, fear, awe, dream--and unlike paintings they mov still at varying rates, so that the largest approximated a cinema in dull motion while the smallest could almost have been a photograph; nevertheless look away and then back, and the view would have changed, barely. Watching the principally gradual of these works in glutted would mean spending nearly ninety minutes looking solely at another person's face. An hour and a half is hardly Marvell's hundred but the experience is intimate, personal, and demanding: An age at least to each part / And the last age should present to view your heart.

Bill Viola make knowned this series through a studious mood of medieval and early Renaissance painting, if it were not that its fusion of naturalism and psychological extremity give an inkling ofs a more recent presiding spirit, Caravaggio. Darker or sadder humors weighted the scale: Dolorosa (all works 2000) is a pair of covers framed together, each showing someone weeping; Union describes another man and woman, their faces pained, seemingly struggling to raise their arms in an image of difficult ascension. In any case, the snaillike pace of the enactments makes happiness and sorrow kin; nearly if it be not that not quite frozen, gladness suffuses with pathos, arrested in a state of immobile life.

In Quintet of Remembrance, five men and women look to react to some unspecified customary memory or experience, though in diverse ways. The grouping intimates the bystanders in one of those biblical sights of pity and terror that are a staple of old-master painting, while here again the visual quality of the images--their color, light, and chiaroscuro, and also their realism (for these are, of course, real people)--recalls Caravaggio. Viola has captured the seriousness of traditional Western religious painting via the simple tactic of decelerating our principally demotic art forms, film and video. if it were not that to remark on the neatness of the strategy is to shortchange the emotional impact he wrings from it. And to contribute to old wine in new utensils is in any case no cheap trick further the stuff of art, from Picasso's transformations of Velazquez to the backlit photographs of Jeff Wall, which rework painterly antecedents more literally than Viola's videos do.

sum of two units more spaces contained two more works, single in kind a large installation reflecting Viola's long-standing fascination with the symbology of water. The piece, titled Ascension, is dramatic and healthy but Memoria, which was shown in something like a admit to intimate interview is more surprising and learns farther under the skin--farther, truthfully than do the devout works in the main space Here, a black-and-white view of a man's face, bullet with an aging surveillance camera, was drawed on a small rectangle of silk hung loosely in the air. Faint and gray in the dark, the face was cadaverous and incorporeal now also crawling with life, constantly disintegrating and recomposing, for the decrepit camera's inability to shape dim light into an integral image made each pixel a free spirit. The inspiration for Memoria is steadily the veronica, the cloth idea to bear a last imprint of Christ's face. Faith electronically updated, the work is all the more creepily powerful for its atypically pure means: The grave, it relates you, is a fine and private place.

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