Since 1990, Daniel Chust Peters (São Paulo, 1965) has been reproducing his studios one after the other in an obsessive and systematic way in the form of small models of various sizes, from the scale of the hand to that of the body. The artist thus creates an activity that chases its tail: making only objects that duplicate the space in which he works. Mise en abyme lies in wait, with all the hazards it entails. Indeed, Daniel Chust Peters himself points out the stupidity of infinitely repeating the same procedure and of defining a work method that is so fixed as:

1- I’ve got an idea: I’ll reproduce my studio

2- I haven’t got any ideas: I’ll reproduce my studio

3- I’ve got another idea: I’ll reproduce my studio

This repetitive system, seemingly absurd, allows the artist to free himself of having to decide «what to do?», of the constraint of choosing a fresh subject for each piece of work. He uses this verbal maxim, a sort of rule of the game, as a motor for his work. Putting it into words opens up the potentials of the work. Lawrence Weiner might spring to mind: he first produces his physical, plastic propositions in his studio but shows the public only the dematerialised concept of the work, written on the walls of the exhibition space. Unlike Weiner, turning this procedure around even, Chust Peters undertakes to exhaust potentials through the presentation of multiple formulations, each piece of work being a possible tangible thing. In miniature, the studio is transformed by turns into a greenhouse full of plants , a marbles track , a refuge for birds , a game for children … Reactive, these works may even go as far as to examine the relationship between production and use value, as with Airshow, made up of five-euro notes of an amount equal to the budget set aside by the institution for the production of the exhibition. So, in a reflexive and poetic way, the presence of the object renders visible the processes of the artistic practice and the underlying transactions.