Commissioned to accompany Edgard Varèse's composition, Déserts (1994) gives form to the composer's notes about a visual extension of the music. All Viola's principal themes-aqueous suspension, ghostlike landscapes, fire unbound-come into gorgeous play as counterpoint to the angular music. After Hatsu Yume (and the equally grand I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like from 1986), Viola entered a phase in which lyrical autobiography became yet another link between the mundane and the miraculous. In The Passing (1991), the artist's mortality suffuses the image track, while his labored breathing acts as a bellows pushing and pulling our attachment. Rendered in stark black and white, this stunning work charts an ambiguous landscape of life where delivery and departure, death and dream, seem to be equivalent terrain. In one exquisite sequence, the artist is submerged in murky water, suspended in some inchoate state, waiting to rise (or descend) through consciousness. Though The Passing concerns itself with the impermanence of life, it seems a celebration. Through haunting images, it reminds us that what we leave behind remains, a surreal testament to our time here.