A March evening. Night has fallen and I am making my way through a spring shower to get to an art opening. At the end of his introduction, the speaker concludes with the statement that the most important characteristic of a museum is not so to assemble objects, but rather a reflection on what art could be today. In silence I sigh discouraged. My thoughts shift to Nicolas Provost’s films, in search of the joy that I experienced the first time that I saw one of his films. The best art aims directly for the heart. And that is exactly what I hate this town (2002) did. No hours of thinking and worrying, but instead disco and dancing.

My first encounter with a Nicolas Provost film (Ronse, 1969) was one that I would not easily forget. The disc of his I hate this town hit the player in the video lounge of the Argos Festival and it felt as if a party broke loose. Initially, the screen was black, and we heard a voice-over, much like an old-fashioned black and white film, in which a woman asked a man for protection. Followed by booming beats and a rhythmically edited film fragment from a rather tame sex movie. His clip-like processing had the images swinging, in scratch-like fashion, from a pair of nude breasts to aroused looks and love-making poses. There was no reticence, no impertinence; rather an ironic and loving approach to his subject: physical lust. This was a breath of fresh air among so much artistic embitterment and doubts cast on lust and love. A new sound. Free of theoretically substantiated desperation and difficult words and concepts.

Cinema is the alpha and omega of Nicolas Provost’s movies. He always uses cinematographical images as his starting point, which he edits or films himself in a cinematographical manner. We imagine that his love for film must have originated sometime during his happy youth in Ronse, somewhere on a couch in front of the TV of a middle class family. In a flash of film between TV broadcasts in two different national languages or in a local cinema, of the “Cinema Paradiso” type. There and then the desire to capture the world in film language must have been born.

This is predated by numerous professional, amorous and geographical encounters, before he made his first film, during his ten-year stay in Norway. Need any help? (1999) is a short film about love, filmed against the dramatic backdrop of the Norwegian fjords. It is a typically melancholic and romantic Provost film. Swinging, funny and touching. Replete with filmic atmospheres and amorous feelings.

The film narrates the tale of an accidental meeting between a man and a woman during a car trip in a mountainous landscape. They discuss their broken love lives in a touching but somewhat clumsy manner. The film starts with Bond-like credits of a female silhouette, dancing to an instrumental number, which also serves as the score for the images and determines their rhythm. The whole James Bond atmosphere determines the actors’ interpretation, who are virtuosos at imitating the typical male and female roles of a 50s movie. At the same time, it clashes with their lack of cool and vigour. This contrast is like a fissure in an attitude that hints at a certain fragility.

This is how Provost makes his movies. Full of filmic desire and with a talented camera eye, he heads into the mountains with intuition, but without a budget, until he has created a condensed, cinematographic short film. The pleasure, with which he translates a characteristic of love into a film story, is reminiscent of the early, playful Cindy Sherman and her first film still series.

Provost always enjoys doodling with film codes, a grammar for writing filmic love poems.

The hesitant rapprochement in love returns once again in the film The Divers (2006), in which a man and a woman let their rapprochement slip away from them under a shower of fireworks. In Yellow Mellow (2002) meanwhile, a man in a lion’s suit roams the streets, overcome by pangs of love, looking for consolation under a street lantern in the blue light of dusk.

Nicolas Provost is not trying to settle any accounts with his movies. Not with another genre, not with society and not with the world. He strips down the codes of the big Hollywood productions. But his films are stylistically condensed versions, rather than the usual criticism or commentary on the appearances of American imagination. Tragic film poems about lust, suffering and love. Like other good artists of his generation (Banksy, Koen van den Broek, Jan De Cock) Provost releases art from its straitjacket of green-eyed suspicion. The best artists of this generation have an artistic bone to pick with (American) mass culture.
This is nowhere clearer in Provost’s work than in the six-minute long film kiss Gravity (2007).
 
A compilation of kisses from various movies, which alternate in a flickering light. Technically speaking, Gravity is not very original in its reworking of stereotypical film scenes. But its deconstruction must be seen in a different light than that of the pure anti-attitude of art to film. Yes, in this film you do see how he sees through the sugary sweet aspect of Hollywood, with the rapid succession of kissing fragments. But at the same love is revived in all its forms.
 
And the dizzying succession of fast-moving images and light flashes is both auto-referential and existential. Provost undresses film and love, like a body on the verge of being loved.
He also does this when he takes on fragments from well-known films, as is clear in Papillon d’Amour (2003), based on fragments from Akira Kurosawa’s movie, Rashomon. Under the direction of a repetitive guitar fragment, a woman is transformed, before two seated men, from a one-eyed monster into an elegant butterfly and a dancing veil. Provost undoubles and mirrors the black and white fragments of Kurosawa’s movie and manages to write a song in images, to the vicissitudes of the melody that determines the ebb and flow of love.
In Provost’s films, any form of filmic abstraction is more a translation of a mood than a theoretical reflection. Even in the most ‘abstract’ films, such as Suspension (2007), in which reflected palls of smoke surface from the dark under the glare of bright studio lights. The shapes adopted by the soft, white clouds are just as peaceful as the waves beating down on a beach. An acceptance of life emanates from these images, with their highs and lows. Much like the human spirit which, even when beaten down with worries, is still unable to relinquish its life force.

As a pictorial artist, Nicolas Provost has an unusual sense of style and tragedy. His decoding of film language is a stylistic technique; its objective is to tell an accessible and touching drama. By deforming the images, he is not out to confuse the viewer, but simply to touch him.
 
Provost believes in image and fiction; in his work, personal imagination quenches its thirst at the sources of mass culture. Within the context of contemporary art, an unproblematic use of image and story is rather exceptional. American art critic Clement Greenberg’s conviction that art needs to leave images to mass media, in order to create its own ‘image’ continues to be the norm. Much like the strategy of the storyteller is still considered a ‘bourgeois strategy of presenting an illusion’ (Thomas McEvilley on Paul McCarthy).
In the film Exoticore (2004) Nicolas Provost tells the dramatic tale of an African immigrant in Western society, played by actor Issaka Sawadogo. Without much dialogue, we see how the lead character is trying in vain to establish contact. The film is a succession of painful disappointments and frustrations of an African man in Norway. Away from his African family and Norwegian family, he is desperately in search of friends, tortured with loneliness.
From the very first scene in which the lead character vainly tries to strike up a conversation with two women, Exoticore supersedes the concrete story of a difficult integration, taking on a general, more human meaning. The viewer is not an outsider, who is taught a lesson in racism, but is able to identify effortlessly with the loneliness that the character is suffering from in this touching epic.
 
Provost does not mind using ‘classic’ narrative structures. There is a lead character, which the viewer can identify with, but the story also runs along a recognisable pattern of opening, development and denouement. The belief in fiction is also very much present. His own experiences as a Belgian who emigrated to Norway serve as a source of inspiration. Thanks to the power of fiction, Provost is able to elevate them to a higher level. The only experimental aspect of this film is that images and music carry the story, rather than words. His uncomplicated relation with an ordinary narrative structure is related to his love for the image, which is just as relaxed.
 
As a result, Provost is one of the rare artists, who uses the formal aspects of cinema as a fullyfledged narrative structure, and who does not play gratuitous form games or defines his own identity as a work of art in a negative relation to cinema through formal interventions. There is no theoretically substantiated inaccessibility in Provost’s work. The images speak for themselves. The work of art tells its own story.

‘I am not a political artist’, says Provost. He is quick to emphasise the difference with the average contemporary artist, who desires to be political, read, and subversive. In its rush to be political, art forgets to be itself. A clear example was the politically correct installation Dream by African artist Romuald Hazoumé at the last Documenta in Kassel. It consisted of nothing more but a photo of an idyllic beach with an improvised boat. But the message about the West being to blame was abundantly clear.
 
Worse than the lack of artistic quality is the guilt and victim thinking, in which this type of contemporary art is entrenched. American art critic Robert Hughes refers to it as a cultural form of separatism in his book The Culture of Complaint. In Dream
Hazoumé demands from the (Western) visitor that he confesses his guilt and asks the (African) victim for his forgiveness. Provost manages to escape the ideological stranglehold of guilt and victim thinking with Exoticore. In so doing, he creates a tragedy that is able to transcend the political and artistic contours of its own age. Man in Exoticore is neither the perpetrator, nor the victim in this film, no more, no less. He is an “exotic hero”, to which this film is dedicated. More man and hero, than culprit or victim.

Fiction has a separate status in the field of pictorial art. It is a concept that is no longer in use. It no longer represents an artist’s capability to condense reality. Fiction in the mouth of pictorial art has come to mean a lie. And it is the artist’s task to cut through this lie.
In reality the artist attacks the lie of mass media. It is the representation of our culture, which is being assaulted in mass media. The first victim is always Hollywood, that American dream machine, which rocks people to sleep. An artist will preferably decorticate an American film, in order to reveal the lies and manipulations. As an artist-psychoanalyst, he wishes to confront the viewer with the truth.

Not that there really is another truth, or that such a truth is known. But it is better to live in a confrontation with the desert of reality, rather than live in the lie of a dream. More than reality or truth, the artist is striving to reveal what is real in his revelation, an obscure zone between reality and imagination. Earth’s equivalent of Purgatory.

The assignment, which today’s conventional artist faces, is hugely difficult, because people are so poisoned by the lies of mass media, that he can only hope that the viewer becomes aware of this poisoning. And sometimes tough, aggressive means are required to do this.
An artist is the angry conscience of his era, and hopes that man becomes aware of the burning sun in the desert of reality. Fiction, imagination, beauty and creativity are burnt concepts, which the artist cannot use in his role of the angry conscience. He needs to yell, blackmail and hit. Kick people’s conscience, not create beauty.

The most prominent target of art is thus per definition always Hollywood, “America” by extension. Art loves to lodge a frontal attack on American culture in the lion’s den. This can be achieved by perverting Hollywood, Disney, Bush or another symbol of American culture, or by firing at the moralistic concept of ‘the real’ at 9/11 and by making it clear to Americans that they have been completely alienated from the tough reality by the images generated by mass media. The angry conscience of art wants to force the (American) viewer to confess.

Nicolas Provost is not breaking any new ground by making a film based on footage shot in the streets of New York with Plot Point (2007). Ordinary street life takes on a filmic gloss, reality is converted into fiction. Ordinary passers-by in the street become actors in a film.
Ordinary policemen cool protagonists, on the beat against an invisible threat. He filmically manipulates reality and sketches a portrait of a nation living in fear.

Provost films the timeless human capacity of imagination in all its beauty and tragedy, without inflicting a moralistic wallop on the magic of American imagination. The palpable tension in the movie is not merely a threat; beauty is not merely about appearance. The gloss, which he extracts from New York street life, is also the glow of daily life. A glow, which jumps like a spark of recognition from the movie. Provost turns reality into exciting fiction by condensing reality. The old dream of imagination is not a lie or a fraud. It is a gift for artists with talent.