Seasoned Egg (2013) is a large photograph taken by the duo made up of the Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão (1979) and Pedro Paiva (1977). Both chicken’s and ostrich eggs are recurrent elements are their works. They have fried them in slow motion in a video, Fried Egg (2008), and included them in installations like Eye Model (2006). In Seasoned Egg (2013), they have enlarged a photograph of the egg that focuses on its yolk, of which they have taken an extreme close-up while leaving the rest out of shot. The yolk appears floating on a sky blue background.

We know full well what an egg is like because it is a staple of many of the world’s cuisines. The yolk, the nutritional element of the egg, floats suspended on the chalaza, a set of protein threads, and although it is enclosed within the shell, it is separated from it by the vitelline membrane of the white. The function of eggs is to safeguard and feed the embryo, but if they are not fertilised, they maintain their properties intact as a result of the erratic ovulation of chickens. There is therefore something of a humorous intention in causing an effect of strangeness with such a recognisable object. Gusmão + Paiva come so close to the yolk that the grains of salt flavouring it attain bodily substance. To use an analogy, it is as though those transparent dots were accidents recorded by an astronomical photograph of the sun, or we were being shown the floating worlds of microorganisms through the lens of an electronic microscope. The universe and the microcosm resemble each other in a “poetic-philosophical fiction” that blends science and fiction through an everyday object seen from a different perspective, creating a metaphor of the origin of life. It is an extraordinary world whose primal referent is very simple, is to be found in all our homes, and has fed us since we were children.

However, there are other possible interpretations. We can compare this photograph with the aforementioned installation Eye Model, which recreates an optical experiment by René Descartes. In this piece, a broken ostrich egg takes the place of the pupil, the part of the eye in which the objects we look at around us are reflected, and through which we gain much of our knowledge of what the world is and what we are. To quote the painter Camille Pissarro, who adopts a less philosophical and more poetic perspective, it involves “looking into the humble, where others see nothing.” Such an understanding is born of the heterodoxy of realising that science and art come from the same place, as both are attempts at comprehension in order to bring us closer to what we are and what the world we live in is.

Through this method of presentation, Gusmão + Paiva try to reveal what is a priori indiscernible, allowing us to appreciate thousandths of seconds and tiny details that would otherwise be imperceptible. The verifiable in scientific research and the qualitative and creative in the arts and humanities are two parallel formulae that occasionally intersect when it comes to interpreting the world. In this respect, the duo from Lisbon follow the words of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who maintained there are things that reason cannot attain and which poetic intuition nevertheless brushes against. Hence their literary references and influences, from Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe to Jorge Luis Borges, or their echoes of Surrealism and its results and modes of production. In this sense, these Portuguese artists go a step further. They are suspicious from the start of the system of beliefs from which we observe the world, but their attitude is a light-hearted one that Rocío de la Villa has called the “white humour of nonsense”.

Isabel Tejeda