Nicolas Provost’s art often smells like software. In ‘Long Live the New Flesh’, the Belgian artist runs clips from gory movies through image processors while keeping them recognisable: as, say, Jack Nicholson wielding his axe in ‘The Shining’ segues into Christian Bale doing similarly in ‘American Psycho’, the imagery morphs and liquefies in a painterly pixelated haze – at once breaking down and hurtling forward. It’s watchable, but one can’t help feeling that Provost is trying to make some kind of cultural-studies point amid the glitches: about how cinematic clichés colonise the mind, about technology and death.
It’s also hard to avoid thinking of Christian Marclay’s rather less hysterical work – even more so in ‘Gravity’, with its wizardly rapid-fire toggling between Hollywood scenes of couples embracing, scenarios overlapping so that one pair’s clinch is embedded into another’s separating. It gets better. In ‘Storyteller’, stock panning across what looks like Las Vegas – here, at least, are the Bellagio, the Flamingo, the Venetian – is mirrored on the vertical, so that the gamblers’ paradise ambivalently resembles a passing spaceship’s hyper-complex hull.
And 'Stardust' mingles thriller-style signifiers – lots of prowling cars, for starters – with clandestinely shot footage of real actors off-duty. Seen from a distance conferring at a table with acquaintances, the late Dennis Hopper comes over as engaged in some nefarious errand, and we’re reminded what suckers we are for cinema.