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Born in 1969 in Romse (Belgium).
Lives and works in Brussels.
Artist website : www.nicolasprovost.com
Distributor : www.argosarts.org
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Nicolas Provost’s oeuvre, shown with notable success at international film festivals in recent years, has been described as a working-off of the filmic codes of narrative cinema. Indeed his experiments with found footage, revolving around the clichés and conventions of the Hollywood mainstream, along with his short fictional films, which try the structural limits of the genre, range between the re-presentation of a canon and its subversive dismantlement. They astound due to the relative simplicity of the formal interventions and the obviousness of the sources from which he draws. He plays, or so it seems, a game with open cards. The particular visual pleasure derived from his works seems to result from their direct visceral impact, rather more than the intellectual riddles involving the viewer as to the materials employed or the process of their rearrangement. His practise is one of aesthetic detournement, which appropriates forms and formulas in order to submit them to a playful process of distortion, masking and displacement, and ultimately to turn them into a highly visceral experience.
Bataille (2005) and Papillon d’amour (2005), for instance, are based on key scenes from Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashômon [1950], which are modified by a simple intervention: the insertion of a vertical axis of reflection through the image center. This central axis defines the focus of agency and, at the same time, the sphere of maximum turbulence on the image plane. It becomes an interstice perpetually engulfing and rebirthing images, producing figures in ongoing metamorphosis. Be it the step-by-step disembodiment of the female figure in Papillon d’amour, or the repeated submergence and reemergence of the two antagonists in Bataille—the fold simultaneously promises protection and destruction, making the figures more and less than whole.
The almost physical impact of these works finds its counterpart in Gravity (2007), for which Provost fragmented kissing scenes from classic Hollywood films into minimized plot segments and assembled them in flickering, superimposed patterns. While, for one, Hollywood melodrama—with its stereotypical stock of figures, plots, and dramaturgical developments—is thus coalesced into a single video sequence, thus laying bare the structure of its functioning, the flicker effect pulsating at various frequencies engenders a reflexive arousal of the sense of sight. Whereas earlier videos like The Divers (2005) still rely on the narrative phrasing of melodrama (even if its elements are reduced to an absolute minimum), in Gravity the form itself becomes the source of the dramatic: the eternally self-updating filmic patterns are radicalized in a metaformula of intuitively sensual appeal.
(Excerpts from a text of Katrin Mundt – www.argos.org)
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