LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH

’Long Live the New Flesh’ deploys a technique in which the images literally consume one other and the horror in all its visual power is brought to a natural boiling point. All the ingredients that have secured Provost’s experimental art films their international success are once again present here. Provost strips down the imagery of a mass medium, uses it to construct a new visual story beyond the dissection and horror, and allows the viewer to cross every phase of the emotional spectrum. Provost’s work uses the language of film to manoeuvre and influence the interpretation of images and stories. He manipulates time, codes and form, twisting and shaping new narratives and experimental sensations that tightly bind visual art and cinematography. He taps into our collective filmic memory and reconstructs it to stunning effect. Using different digital techniques, Provost ’scratches’ the images so that pixels, their very own structure, become very dominant in the image. Exactly from exposing the grain of the medium itself, ’Long Live the New Flesh’ derives its pictorial, painterly quality. Duality is intrinsic in much of Provosts work, both literally with optical mirroring and conceptually when he toys with the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, the sublime and the ugly, the utopian and the concrete, the marvelous and the terrible, and finally, between truth and invention. Provost is part scientist and part magician, generating a grotesque visual poetry of hypnotic beauty and macabre consequences.