Since 2001, the Portuguese duo of artists Joao Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva have pursued a phenomenological research on the world surrounding us, working in particular on perception and vision. Their films show short purely visual sequences without narrative effects that make up the elements of a much wider and unresolved investigation.

In their sculptures, the two Lisbon-based artists explore our relationship to reality, to then upset it with an analytical precision, finesse and humour.

Their bronze artworks represent objects in everyday situations, motifs taken from comic strips, buildings and constant figures and animals.

Concerning the sculptures, the interaction between the title and the artwork, as well as the unusual constellations create a semantic and sometimes surreal shift. The artists constantly evolve at the limits of the static dimension of bronze sculpture and the dynamic dimension of film, creating in this manner sculptures that express a temporal continuity.

Perched on a martial pedestal, just as its quality of a victorious general’s horse allows, Gusmão and Paiva’s Horse weighs up the stroller of Château Chasse-Spleen’s park. When one moves closer to the bronze sculpture, it loses its superb.

In a childlike Mimmo Paladino stylisation, brought back to basic volumes (tubes, cones), it is at once amusing and worrying. Human prints instead of hooves, the back left leg executing a dance step, ears very straight but with a fixed gaze, two marbles. For that matter, what has it done with the general?

It appeared tempting to us to play with this warlike codification present in many parks of our cities.

It is supposed to symbolise part of the many national stories that can only be built, that have only been built, on the assertion of their inevitably necessary real or imaginary strength.