Englishman Daniel Dewar and Frenchman Gregory Gicquel met as students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rennes and formed an impertinent duo that loves to tackle any and all materials that fall into their hands, from the hardest rock to the most basic clay. For them, value hierarchies and chronologies are for theoreticians, not artists. Their ambitions lie elsewhere, in making things and colliding with the real. Seduced by their funny, hybrid, often monumental work, which draws from the past as well as from the banal details of daily life, a jury of collectors has nominated them for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, which will be award October 20 at FIAC. (The other artists nominated are Valérie Favre, Franck Scurti, and Bertrand Lamarche.) The pair recently corresponded with ARTINFO France, answering questions about their work, with characteristic irony.

What are you going to show for the Prix Duchamp? A new work or something that you have already made?

A new work. A stele for the Montparnasse cemetery, which was commissioned for a collector’s family tomb. We sculpted a recumbent statue out of dolerite (a volcanic rock that is only slightly vitreous and is made of micro-crystals). It depicts a reclining diver with his hands raised.

You made a series of very imposing clay statues in 2012. Can you tell us more about them?

They are large-scale clay models that we make outdoors and whose positions we change to produce animated GIF images in loops of one or two seconds. The subjects are put into motion. A steer, for example, an orgiastic scene, or a ballet movement.

Why do you like this interaction with the natural environment?

Gregory and I looked at photographs produced by the British Land Art movement in the 1980s. We want to produce this kind of document, these engaging images. It’s interesting to photograph sculptures because it’s a very reductive process.

You work not just with raw clay, but also with raw wood, ceramic, and granite. What is your interest in all these different materials?

We use clay because it’s easy to handle. You can find it everywhere. We use it the way other artists draw. The forms appear at very different speeds according to the material. So varying them often is especially interesting.

What is it like working as a duo?

It’s exactly like working alone, except that physically there are two people!

You use photography and video, but you are essentially sculptors. Why do you choose this medium more than any other?

For us, it’s not a medium in particular that makes it sculpture, but its involvement in a reality.

When watching you work, it feels more like being on a construction site than in a studio. There’s a real physical involvement. Why is producing things so important to you?

We love sports!

In your show “Crepe Suzette” in Bristol in June, there was a wooden greyhound wearing athletic socks, a diver half-buried in the ground, and a saddle with a penis at the end. Are all these associations justified by a concept, or are you sometimes just seeking to create astonishment and laughter?

Yes, all the associations we make are justified. Sometimes by a poetic expression. Sometimes by an entropic link. Or sometimes by the mimetic connection between a material and a scent, or a subject and a color. The saddle with a penis at the end is sculpted in wood that has the scent of a horse. On the other hand, I can’t say why we put those socks on the greyhound.