A lonely girl is approached by a shy boy on a moonlight balcony. Their longing is hampered by the mysteries of love. The Divers is a neo-romantic audiovisual painting. It is a poem that combines the quest of the artist for the mysterious elements that create pathos in sound and image, as much as it is a melodramatic experience reaching for the viewer's subconscious cinematic and emotional memory.
The work of Nicolas Provost walks the fine line between dualities, balancing fiction and fine arts, the grotesque and the moving, the beautiful and the cruel. His phantasmagorias provoke both recognition and alienation and succeed in pulling audience expectations into an unraveling game of mystery and abstraction. In some videos, filmic memory is stimulated through the use of short fragments from classic films by Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais or Russ Meyers, but Provost is as likely to utilize obscure B-films, contemporary cinema or thematic platitudes. Time and form are manipulated, cinematographic and narrative language is analyzed, accents are shifted and new stories are told. The extraordinary is elucidated in order to reveal the global. In addition to the use of film and visual language, sound is a constant factor in Provost's body of work, as a rhythmical spine or an emotional guideline.
"My field of interest is to analyze and question the phenomenon of cinema, its various elements, its influence and conventional rules. My work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience. That said, it’s all about love.”
—Nicolas Provost