NICOLAS PROVOST - PLOT POINT TRILOGY

After the critically acclaimed success of his first feature film The Invader, Nicolas Provost (1969) presents the fresh Plot Point Trilogy at Argos. Provost’s work reflects on the grammatics of cinema, the human condition in our collective film memory and the relationship between visual art and the cinematic experience. Time and again his phantasmagorias provoke both recognition and alienation and succeed in capturing our expectations in an unravelling game of mystery and abstraction. Staged in a specially for the occasion constructed immersive setting, the exhibition at Argos brings together the three episodes of the Plot Point Trilogy for the first time, including the premiere of the final chapter that Provost shot in the heart of Tokyo. The trilogy investigates the boundaries and influences between fiction and reality by filming everyday life with a hidden camera and then editing the cinematic images into a fiction film using narrative codes from the Hollywood film language. The first episode, Plot Point (2007), turned Times Square into a dramatic thriller featuring the NYPD as a main character. After New York, Provost took his hidden camera to Las Vegas for the second episode, Stardust (2010), and transformed the glorious and ambiguous power of the gambling capital into an exciting crime story featuring real Hollywood stars. In the last episode of this series, Provost infiltrates the daily life of the Japanese metropolis following a serial killer character played by an actor.


All images Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp.

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• Artist Talk Nicolas Provost