3 March 2016. Bill Viola at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

YSP is hosting an extraordinary set of films by Bill Viola, The underground gallery has a series of films that seem variations on a theme of one or a small group emerging from a grainy background to pass through a waterfall into full focused colour - before retreating to again be hazy black and white outlines. There is no real need for the guidebook to twig that Viola is here portraying the boundary between life and death and pondering on the existential.

The gallery also houses The Trial, in which a couple on separate screens are showered with a tar coloured liquid, followed by blood and finally clear water. Another pairing is the aged and naked man and woman on separate screens who examine themselves intensely with torches for some twenty minutes. Entitled Man searching for immortality / Woman searching for eternity, it is an intense piece that confronts us with old age and impending death.

More enigmatic is The Dreamers, with seven characters, each on their own screen, covered peacefully by water. They lie there, eyes closed, with an air of serenity. The Veiling has layers of thin cloth with projectors at either end. I found it the most difficult of the pieces - simply to see what was going on.

On the other hand, Night vigil was much clearer. One of three pieces inspired by a production of Tritan and Isolde to which viola contributed, it is a diptych with, on one screen, a woman lighting memorial candles and on the other, a man emerging. As she lights the final candle on her screen, he fully emerges and passes through  a bonfire on his screen.

The other two films of this Tristan and Isolde trio were shown at the Chapel, one after the other. With the contrast of Fire and Water, Fire Woman has a woman silhoueted against an enormous raging fire before falling backwards into a lake. Gradually the lake moves up the screen until it has taken over. The second film, Tristan's Ascension, starts with him lying on a slab before water starts falling. Slowly it increases in intensity until it become a torrent of water and bubbles, sufficient to float him into the vertical and ascend him to disappear at the top of the screen. These were two films of almost hypnotic quality that I would happily have watched again and again.